{"id":37849,"date":"2025-09-15T15:01:24","date_gmt":"2025-09-15T20:01:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/memphislawblog.com\/?p=37849"},"modified":"2025-09-15T15:01:24","modified_gmt":"2025-09-15T20:01:24","slug":"250-years-of-our-declaration-of-independence-september-18th-at-rhodes-college","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/memphislawblog.com\/index.php\/250-years-of-our-declaration-of-independence-september-18th-at-rhodes-college\/","title":{"rendered":"250 Years of Our Declaration of Independence – September 18th at Rhodes College"},"content":{"rendered":"
When Thomas Jefferson\u2019s draft of the\u00a0Declaration of Independence<\/a>\u00a0toured the nation on a \u201cFreedom Train<\/a>\u201d in 1947-1948, Boss Crump\u2019s Memphis was one of only two cities whose scheduled visits were bypassed. (The other was Bull Connor\u2019s Birmingham.) Why? The exhibit\u2019s national organizers were dismayed at Memphis city leaders\u2019 insistence on segregating visitors, apparently out of fear that \u201csomebody might get the idea that American Freedom should also apply to Memphis and Shelby County<\/i><\/a>.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
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American Freedom is now coming to Memphis. In honor of the 250th<\/sup>\u00a0anniversary<\/a>\u00a0of the 1776\u00a0Declaration, the\u00a0Spence Wilson Center for Interdisciplinary Humanities<\/a>\u00a0at Rhodes College presents a free public lecture on Thursday, September 18 (6pm, McNeill Concert Hall) by Dr.\u00a0Danielle Allen<\/a>,\u00a0the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard and director of the\u00a0Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
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This event is free and open to the public, but all attendees must pre-register using this link:<\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
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https:\/\/fs22.formsite.com\/webmanagerrhodesedu\/4i7kriyth1\/index<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
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Allen, who\u2019s both a renowned scholar and a public policy advocate, makes the radical proposition that the best way to commemorate the Declaration is by simply reading it\u2014yet reading it\u00a0slowly<\/a>.<\/span><\/div>\n
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Combining a personal account of teaching the Declaration with a vivid evocation of the colonial world, Allen\u2019s award-winning book\u00a0Our Declaration<\/i><\/a>\u00a0reveals our nation\u2019s founding text as not a catechism to be memorized but an animating force that can and did change the world. Challenging conventional wisdom, Allen boldly makes the case that the Declaration is a document as much about political equality as about individual\u00a0freedom<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
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As an English teacher, I love the way that\u00a0Our Declaration<\/i>\u00a0attends so carefully to language. Allen takes us down to the level of a word (what exactly does \u201ccourse<\/a>\u201d mean in \u201cthe course of human events<\/i>\u201d?), or even a\u00a0punctuation<\/a>\u00a0mark (is that a comma after \u201cthe pursuit of happiness<\/i>,\u201d or was it rather a smudged semicolon?).\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n

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She brings to bear the full breadth of\u00a0humanities methods (close reading, archival research, ethical reflection) and disciplines (ancient Mediterranean studies, history, languages, literature, philosophy, politics, religious studies)\u00a0on this crucial document.\u00a0Reading the Declaration sentence-by-sentence, clause-by-clause, word-by-word, Allen crafts a moving memoir about her teaching in\u00a0<\/span>The Clemente Course in the Humanities<\/a>.<\/span><\/div>\n
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Our city\u2019s history has long been intertwined with the Declaration. While Tennessee didn\u2019t become a\u00a0state<\/a>\u00a0until two decades after the signing of the Declaration, and Memphis wasn\u2019t incorporated until\u00a01819<\/a>, \u201c<\/span>the Fourth Chickasaw Bluff was well-known to native Americans and explorers from France and Spain<\/a>.\u201d As Allen acknowledges, the Declaration \u201cprovided tools for liberating some and dominating others<\/i>,\u201d including the\u00a0indigenous peoples<\/a>\u00a0who thrived long before colonists and traders came to our area.<\/span><\/div>\n
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Allen also wrestles with the cruel irony of how\u00a0segregationists revised the Declaration\u2019s aspirational conjunction of \u201cseparate\u00a0and<\/i>\u00a0equal\u201d to the doctrine of \u201cseparate\u00a0but\u00a0<\/i>equal<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0(<\/span>Our state\u2019s 1861 vote for secession called for a \u201cDeclaration of Independence<\/a>\u00a0and Ordinance dissolving the Federal Relations between the State of Tennessee and the United States of America<\/i>.\u201d)<\/span><\/div>\n
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The first gallery in the Memphis National Civil Rights Museum starkly underlines the incongruity between the Declaration\u2019s lofty words its slaveholding authors. Called \u201cA Culture of Resistance<\/a>: Slavery in America 1619\u20131861,\u201d the exhibit juxtaposes the brutal history of Atlantic Slave Trade with the famous passage from the Declaration\u00a0\u201cWe hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
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Yet the Declaration also provided a lexicon for fighting oppression. As Rhodes Provost\u00a0Timothy Huebner<\/a>\u00a0has documented,\u00a0<\/span>\u201cAlmost from the founding of America, black leaders claimed the words of the\u00a0Declaration of Independence and used them\u00a0to promote the rights of African Americans<\/i><\/a>.\u201d Some notable examples include\u00a0James Forten<\/a>\u00a0(1813) and\u00a0David Walker<\/a>\u00a0(1829).<\/span><\/div>\n

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Frederick Douglass\u2019s influential\u00a01852 speech<\/a>\u00a0drew encouragement from the Declaration, which he called\u00a0<\/span>\u201cthe RINGBOLT to the chain of your nation\u2019s destiny<\/i>\u201d\u2014characterizing its words as a kind of unfulfilled promise, or overdue payment. University of Memphis historians\u00a0Beverly Bond<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Susan O\u2019Donovan<\/a>\u00a0have argued that the 1866\u00a0Memphis Massacre<\/a>\u00a0\u201cgalvanized Congress into taking the steps that moved Reconstruction . . . [to] a full-blown commitment to the ideals sketched out in the Declaration of Independence<\/i>.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n
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A century later, Martin Luther King, Jr. repeatedly cited the words of the Declaration, whether recalling it as \u201ca promissory note<\/i>\u201d in his \u201cI Have a Dream<\/a>\u201d speech or aligning himself with Jefferson as a so-called \u201cextremist<\/i>\u201d in his\u00a0Letter from a Birmingham Jail<\/a>. In 1967, King delivered a sermon titled entitled \u201cDeclaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam<\/a>,\u201d in which he noted that even though the Vietnamese \u201cquoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them<\/i>.\u201d And in his final \u201cMountaintop<\/a>\u201d speech in Memphis in support of the\u00a0sanitation strike<\/a>, King praised student protesters for \u201cstanding up for the best in the American dream and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy, which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution<\/i>.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n

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Across the globe<\/a>, the Declaration has inspired a startling array of movements. Immigrants to Memphis have been inspired by the Declaration, from the Poland-born pro-suffrage legislator\u00a0Joe Hanover<\/a>\u00a0to the Czech immigrant\u00a0Theodore Ohman<\/a>, who created a lithograph reproduction of the Declaration in Memphis in 1942. Ohman\u2019s print required a complex technical process, with the image derived from the\u00a0last authorized photograph<\/a>\u00a0of the original, which was made in 1903.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
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Rhodes College\u2019s\u00a0Archives<\/a>\u00a0holds a copy of Ohman\u2019s \u201cDeclaration,\u201d which will be on display at Allen\u2019s September 18 lecture. Early arriving guests will receive free pocket copies of the Declaration, as well as hear a selection of music that was enjoyed by (or written by!) the Declaration\u2019s original signers, as part of\u00a0Thirty Days of Opera<\/a>.<\/span><\/div>\n
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Scott Newstok<\/a>\u00a0is Professor of English and Executive Director of the\u00a0Spence Wilson Center for Interdisciplinary Humanities<\/a>.<\/span><\/i><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Thomas Jefferson\u2019s draft of the\u00a0Declaration of Independence\u00a0toured the nation on a \u201cFreedom Train\u201d in 1947-1948, Boss Crump\u2019s Memphis was one...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":528,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-office-of-the-dean"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/memphislawblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/memphislawblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/memphislawblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/memphislawblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/528"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/memphislawblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37849"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/memphislawblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37849\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37851,"href":"https:\/\/memphislawblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37849\/revisions\/37851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/memphislawblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/memphislawblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/memphislawblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}