Updated

Updated · Fox News · Jul 19

Gerri Willis Urges Visits to Revolutionary Sites, Citing Declaration’s Reach to 100 Nations

Updated

Updated · Fox News · Jul 19

Gerri Willis Urges Visits to Revolutionary Sites, Citing Declaration’s Reach to 100 Nations

Q: Why are Thomas Jefferson's chair and Martin Luther King Jr.'s bench displayed together to tell America's 250-year story of freedom?

They are displayed together to show one continuous American story: Jefferson’s chair represents the writing of the nation’s founding promise in 1776, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s bench represents the later struggle to make that promise real for more Americans. At the Museum of the American Revolution’s “The Declaration’s Journey” exhibition, Jefferson’s Windsor chair is believed to be the one he used while drafting the Declaration of Independence. It symbolizes the moment the ideals of equality, natural rights and government by consent were put into words. King’s prison bench, used while he wrote “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in 1963, shows how those same ideals were invoked nearly two centuries later in the fight for civil rights. Museum leaders say the pairing is meant to connect “two revolutionaries, 200 years apart.” The point is not to treat the Declaration as a finished achievement, but as a living standard that Americans have repeatedly used to press the country toward its own creed. Historians note that the Declaration’s line that “all men are created equal” became a powerful tool for later reformers, from abolitionists to women’s rights advocates to King. Placed side by side, the artifacts tell a 250-year story of freedom as both founding principle and unfinished work. They show how Jefferson’s words launched a global and national movement, and how King drew on those words to demand that the United States live up to them.

1 articles · Updated · Fox News · Jul 19

Gerri Willis used a post-July 4 commentary to press Americans to visit Revolutionary War battlefields and historic sites as the U.S. continues marking its 250th anniversary.
More than 100 nations incorporated ideals from the Declaration of Independence, Willis wrote, citing historians and a Museum of the American Revolution exhibit in Philadelphia on the document’s global influence.
Five years of war turned the Declaration from a statement into a nation, she argued, highlighting how underfunded American forces endured defeats, shortages and mutinies before outlasting Britain.
Upcoming commemorations in Boston, New York, Yorktown and Southern battlefields such as Kings Mountain and Camden should broaden attention beyond the Founding Fathers to lesser-known patriots, Willis said.