In my house, two legacies face each other.
On one wall hangs a reproduction of “The Spirit of ’76,” painted by my cousin Archibald M. Willard for the nation’s 100th birthday. The central drummer in that painting — the older man leading the trio — was modeled after Archibald’s father, my cousin too.
The “Spirit of ’76” is America’s most famous Revolutionary painting — the definitive image of independence, instantly recognizable wherever it appears. First displayed at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, it captured the mood of a nation celebrating its 100th year and looking back on its birth in revolution.
For my family, it is not just symbolic. My father descends from six officers in the Massachusetts Line of the Continental Army — and from a seventh, a 13-year-old fifer who fought at Lexington and Concord. He was the youngest combatant on that battlefield, carrying both a fife and a musket into the first fight of the Revolution. He lived into his 90s, long enough to be photographed — the only person from that battlefield whose face we can still see.
That painting is the definitive picture of 1776: a battered but unbroken march for freedom and equality. My family is literally in the frame — and in the fight.
Across the room sits another inheritance: the desk of my mother’s great-great-grandfather, Peter G. Morgan, born enslaved in Nottoway County, Virginia, in 1817.
Beside it rests the courting set he bought so his three daughters, once freed, could welcome suitors in dignity.
My family isn’t just in the picture of 1776. We live the unfinished fight of 1876.
A wager for freedom and equality
In 1864, while Petersburg was under Confederate siege, Morgan walked into a Confederate court and freed his wife and daughters.
Virginia law was brutal: any Black person gaining freedom — and their family — had 12 months to leave the state. Fail to leave, and you could be seized and enslaved again.
So Morgan wagered exile — or even reenslavement — if Confederate authorities got to them before the Union did. Still, he took the risk. He bet everything on freedom and equality.
He was right on the first count. And for a time, right on the second.
Reconstruction’s promise
After the war, Morgan served in Virginia’s House of Delegates from 1869 to 1871. He sat on Petersburg’s city council and school board.
He helped build schools, relief associations and even a bank. He believed that Reconstruction — America’s “second founding” — could finally make freedom and equality real.
But he also lived to see those hopes collapse.
The collapse came just after the hopeful celebration of 1876, with the Compromise of 1877 — a backroom deal to resolve the contested race between Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford Hayes. Republicans kept the White House by giving in to Democratic demands to pull federal troops from the South.
With the old Union soldiers gone, white supremacists unleashed murderous violence to retake power. Reconstruction ended not with a bang but a betrayal — and lynch mobs burning human flesh.
Twin revolutions, both unfinished
That is America in a nutshell: twin spirits, twin moments, both unfinished.
1776 was for freedom.
1876 was for equality.
Yet neither dream dies.
The fire passes from Harriet Tubman to Ella Baker. From Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr. From Chicago’s Jacqueline Jackson to Chicago’s Michelle Obama. And it burns on in young organizers today.
The warning is clear: Freedom and equality are fragile, and gains can be rolled back. Today, both are under attack again — with democracy itself on the line, racial equality undermined and immigrants targeted with open hostility.
The charge is clearer still: If my great-great-great-grandfather could bet on freedom and equality in 1864 while Petersburg burned — and my father’s young ancestor could join his father and brothers in arms at Lexington — surely we can fight for freedom and equality in our own time.
Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former national president and CEO of the NAACP.