COMMENTARY: At 250, America Still Has a Choice

By Rev. Peter Johnson | Texas Metro News

As America approaches its 250th birthday, I find myself thinking less about fireworks and more about footsteps.

I think about the footsteps of Black men and women who walked dusty roads to register voters when doing so could get you fired from your job. I think about the footsteps of children who marched into mobs of hatred armed with nothing but courage and faith. I think about the footsteps of my own journey, more than 65 years in the Civil Rights Movement, walking beside ordinary people who believed America could become better than it was.

Two hundred and fifty years is a long time for a nation. It is long enough to celebrate achievements. It is also long enough to tell the truth.

For Black Americans, patriotism has always been complicated. Our ancestors helped build this nation while being denied its promises. They planted crops they did not own. They built wealth they could not keep. They fought in wars for freedoms they themselves did not enjoy.

Yet somehow, through slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, segregation, redlining, voter suppression, and discrimination, Black people never stopped believing in the possibility of America.

That is what has always amazed me.

The people I marched beside in Louisiana, Washington, D. C., Alabama, Texas, and throughout the South did not demand special treatment. They demanded America live up to its own words.

I remember elderly Black women dressed in their Sunday best standing in line to vote despite threats and intimidation. I remember pastors opening church basements for movement meetings while police cars circled outside. I remember mothers praying over children before they joined demonstrations, uncertain whether they would return home safely.

Those memories are not history lessons for me. They are living memories. That is why I view America’s 250th anniversary with both gratitude and concern.

There is much to celebrate. America remains a nation of extraordinary innovation, opportunity, generosity, and resilience. We have elected leaders once considered impossible. We have opened doors once firmly shut. We have witnessed barriers fall that many believed would stand forever. But anniversaries should be moments of reflection, not self-congratulation.

I worry when I hear language that divides Americans against one another. I worry when voting rights are treated as political inconveniences instead of sacred democratic responsibilities. I worry when history itself becomes something people want to sanitize, edit, or erase.

A nation that forgets where it has been risks repeating where it should never go again.

Many of my Civil Rights friends are now in their eighties and nineties. When we talk, there is pride in what we accomplished, but there is also concern. We see familiar patterns. We hear familiar arguments. We recognize familiar attempts to narrow participation in democracy rather than expand it.

We know what those roads can lead to because we have walked them before.

Still, I remain hopeful. Hope has always been the secret weapon of Black America.

Hope carried our ancestors through slavery. Hope carried sharecroppers through poverty. Hope carried Civil Rights workers through jail cells and fire hoses. Hope carried grandparents who never stopped believing their grandchildren would inherit a better world.

The Black church taught us that hope is not wishful thinking. Hope is holy resistance. Hope is believing that God is still at work even when circumstances suggest otherwise. Scripture reminds us in Galatians 6:9, “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”

For 250 years, America has been an unfinished project. The story has never been perfect. The chapters have often been painful. Yet generation after generation has continued writing.

Now the pen is in our hands.

The question before us is not whether America has flaws. It always has. The question is whether we possess the courage to confront those flaws honestly and the faith to build something better.

As I reflect on more than six decades in the struggle for justice, I know this much: progress is never automatic. Every advance must be protected. Every right must be exercised. Every generation must decide what kind of country it wishes to become.

America at 250 stands at another crossroads. We can choose fear or hope. Division or community. Exclusion or opportunity. Amnesia or truth.

As for me, I choose hope. Not because America has always gotten it right. But because I have spent my life watching ordinary people, empowered by faith and determination, help bend this nation closer to its highest ideals.

And after all these years, I still believe the best chapter of the American story has yet to be written.

Rev. Peter Johnson is a veteran Civil Rights leader, minister, educator, and writer whose activism spans more than six decades. A legend of the Civil Rights Movement, he writes frequently on faith, justice, democracy, and race in America.