The Civil Discord Symposium continued on Friday with a discussion about whether the United States was founded in 1619 or 1776.
Moderated by Justin Dyer, the inaugural Dean for the School of Civic Leadership, the debate-style dialogue featured Stephanie Shonekan and Adam Seagrave, associate professors at the University of Maryland and Arizona State University respectively.
Shonekan and Seagrave co-authored a book, “Race and the American Story,” earlier this year about a diversity, equity and inclusion program they created at the University of Missouri. They created the program for students to engage with topics like white privilege and microaggressions following a string of racist incidents on campus motivated by the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown.
Seagrave took the 1776 position. He compares ideas of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence to a river that stretches through American history, including both before and after 1776.
“To put it simply: 1619 as a narrative finds an important part of its significance in the ideals of 1776,” Seagrave said.
Shonekan took the 1619 stance, saying Black people are the ones who fought hardest for life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, and the narrative surrounding the inception of those ideals must include the year Black people first came to the country.
Shonekan emphasized the urgency of changing this narrative, given a recently passed Alabama bill that restricts discussing “divisive concepts” surrounding race. She said she worried this law will be used to erase Black history from Alabama schools.
“If we could go back and say, ‘let’s focus on 1619 and use that as a starting point,’ there would be no ambiguity there,” Shonekan said. “We wouldn’t get to a stage where we have entire states trying to erode or erase that history.”
Dyer asked whether the founding ideas of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were true at all in 1776 and if that impacts the panelists’ stance on America’s true founding.
Seagrave said the ideas in the Declaration of Independence not being fully implemented when they were written doesn’t make those ideals less true.
“The truths of 1776 are self-evident truths,” Seagrave said. “I think they are true always and for everyone, but I think that’s a different question than the question of whether they are always applied accurately.”
Shonekan said life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were ideals and truths at the time, but asked whether “the people who wrote them (were) truthful,” given that Black people still had to fight for their liberties during the Civil Rights Era.
