ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL FREE

Martin Luther King Jr., who in his “I Have a Dream” speech called the phrase a sacred promise to black Americans.

By the feminists at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 who declared: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men and women are created equal.’ Rights activists from Frederick Douglass to the Rev. Since then, the words have been endlessly adapted and reinterpreted. “He deliberately played down Jefferson’s original emphasis on the problems of collective agreement and consent,” she says. Spann considers Haynes’ response “philosophically innovative” because he isolated the passage containing the famous phrase from the rest of the Declaration and made it express “eternal, universally binding norms.”

ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL FREE

Shortly after July 4, Haynes wrote “The Extension of Liberty: Or, Free Thoughts on the Illegality of Slaveholding,” an essay that was not published until 1983 but was seen as reflecting the sentiments of many in the black community, calling “to affirm that even the African has the same right to their freedom, like the English.” Black Americans were among the first to replace them, notably New England priest Lemuel Haynes. Spann, like leading Revolutionary War scholars like Jack Rakov, believes that “all men are created equal” originally referred less to individual equality than to the rights of the people as a whole to self-government.Īs soon as the Declaration was published, perceptions began to change. Kennedy Institute in Berlin and author of the forthcoming book Black Mind, White Feeling: The Jeffersonian Enlightenment in the African American Tradition, says the draft of the Declaration was clear that Jefferson meant “all men” were created equal, but not necessarily that all people were equal before the law. He added that “this does not mean that he does not recognize his enslaved people as human beings, just that they can only exercise these universal, natural rights elsewhere, in their own country: emancipation and expatriation.” For slaveholder Jefferson “and most of his fellow patriots, enslaved people were property and therefore did not enter into these new governmental systems, leaving their status unchanged,” Onuf says. The Declaration was an indictment of the British monarchy, but not a declaration of justice for all. This undated engraving shows the scene on July 4, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Philip Livingston, and Roger Sherman, was approved by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. The words, in one form or another, originated centuries before the Declaration and were even preceded in 1776 by the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which stated that “all men are by nature equally free and independent.” Peter Onuf, a professor emeritus at the University of Virginia whose books include The Mind of Thomas Jefferson, notes that Jefferson himself did not claim to have said anything radically new, writing in 1825 that the Declaration lacked “originality of principle or feeling. Thomas Jefferson helped immortalize the expression, but he didn’t coin it. “Individualism is embedded in that phrase, but so is a broader, more egalitarian vision. “We say, ‘All men are created equal,’ but does that mean we have to make everyone completely equal at all times, or does it mean everyone gets a fair chance?” says Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice. How we use them often depends not on how we came into this world, but on what kind of world we want to live in.Īs if “All men are created equal” makes us ask, “And then what?” Music and “all men are created equal” economics make it both universal and elusive, adaptable to viewpoints – social, racial, economic – otherwise with little to no common ground. And it is somewhat more difficult to define.

“I don’t think human equality requires a rethinking of what marriage is,” he says.įew words in American history are mentioned as often as the words from the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, published nearly 250 years ago. He also believes that “all men are created equal.” For him, these words mean that we all have “equal dignity, we all count equally, no one is disposable, no one is a second-class citizen.” At the same time, he says, not everyone has an equal right to marry - what he and other conservatives see as the legal union of a man and a woman. Anderson is president of the conservative Center for Ethics and Public Policy. “It’s a desire to keep working, and we haven’t gotten there yet.” “These words say to me, ‘Do better, America.’ And what I mean by that is that we’ve never been a country where people were truly equal,” Jennings says.

He sees his mission in part as fulfilling a sacred American principle: “All men are created equal.”

Kevin Jennings is CEO of Lambda Legal, a prominent LGBTQ rights advocate.