In the 250th year of our nation’s birth, the skies above the United States burn red with flashes of anger and blood. The specters of civil war and world war raise their head; so too does the unfulfilled promise of revolutionary democracy. All possibilities move closer toward us. Everywhere the people are thinking. They see America trapped in a wilderness of chaos and confusion. They know that change must come, and from their own hands.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that Man is divine, that although he has unleashed enormous technological powers, he has yet to free himself. That of all human acts, the most sacred among them is an oppressed people’s resistance to evil. That upon this basis, the American people can yet make the final leap that will usher in an Age of Humanity.
We, in Philadelphia, city of revolution, declare this task to be our purpose.
The American Revolution
Two voices speak to this moment: Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King Jr. One belongs to the past; the other beckons to the future. The American Revolution of 1776 changed the world, yet it was born twisted with contradiction, desecrating its own declaration of the equality of man. What Jefferson and his compatriots began, they could not complete. Democracy died except in the hearts of Black men and women; most of whom remained enslaved.
From this lineage and from the depths of oppression, Martin Luther King rises to the stage of world history. He stands at the center of the most profound revolution in our nation’s life, the Black Freedom Movement of the 20th century; a man anointed by history and by humanity. In a dialogue between Jefferson and King, it is King who has the last word. If this nation is to have a future, Martin Luther King is the door through which we must enter. He is the father of a new American people; it is his voice that we need most desperately.
A Nation in the Wilderness
We assert that the American crisis is in its deepest sense a crisis of civilization, a total crisis of the Western way of life. The signs are all around us. Our rulers have shown their depravity before the eyes of the world. They behave as hounds of hell, cut loose into fields of madness and brazen evil. Donald Trump is but one face of a dying white civilization, descending into civil war with itself. The American State, whose civilizational foundations no longer fit this time in history, is more fragile than at any point since its founding.
But what of the people? The majority of them reject the political system and its elites but are uncertain of where to seek an alternative. For successive generations, they have been engulfed by waves of violence, poverty, and despair. Deliberate policies of deindustrialization have destroyed whole cities. It is nothing less than a program of collective punishment and manipulation against working people. At the center are Black children and youth, condemned as criminals by a criminal society, placed under the iron law of a white supremacist system designed to suffocate their potential. Neither is white America immune. The widening afflictions of mental illness, addiction, suicide, and social nihilism cannot be explained as a mere economic problem; they are evidence of a spiritual crisis, of a civilization that is in total contradiction to the aspirations of humanity. The gods of white supremacy have failed.
All of this is shadowed by the festering cloud of war. Here is where the moral sickness of empire reveals itself; when an entire citizenry can see genocide and murder carried out in our name, and yet be induced to believe it is out of our hands. Is this not the desecration of democracy and basic morality? We know in our hearts that a society cannot sustain itself on the slaughter of innocents and the suppression of mankind. Indeed humanity must judge us harshly, so long as we abdicate responsibility for the course our nation has taken as the greatest purveyor of violence and terror in the world.
As America’s wars come home in monstrous form, a thought spreads among our people, including white folk confronted by the mirror of themselves: if this is whiteness, we want no part in it. And so we face the moral imperative of our time. To achieve democracy, the American people are called to stop war and to abandon whiteness; a task of world-historic importance.
The Gift of Black People
We do not come into this crisis empty-handed. In a changing sea there is one constant: that is Black people and their long struggle for freedom. W.E.B. Du Bois called it the gift of Africa to America, that force which inspires our nation toward its better self. From the ranks of the poor, the disinherited, and the youth, the rejected stones of history now become the cornerstones of the future.
Black people, who have never had illusions about this country, bring to America’s 250th anniversary the gift of their historical experience and consciousness. Where this country has nurtured cowardice and cruelty, African Americans have answered by waging a beautiful and beloved struggle to fulfill the dignity of man and to fashion a society worthy of the child. Where this country has worshipped at the altar of violence, the Black Freedom Movement reached for a higher law of love—and emblazoned for us a nonviolent path to revolution.
By their resistance to white supremacy, Black people have built with bruised hands, a civilization of their own. They have sung new songs, raised up new gods of Freedom, Truth, and Beauty that can answer the prayers of a modern people. Black mothers and fathers, church ministers and factory workers have all played a part in forging a social system whose nature is to produce generations of freedom fighters. The greatest of all gifts has been the sacrifice made by the martyrs of Black people, such heroic figures as Emmett Till and Natasha McKenna who become at their moment of death, a link between mankind and the life eternal; the archetype of a new human being.
In Battle for a New Civilization
We face a paradox never before seen in human history—two civilizations, in one nation. We insist that our struggle in the 21st century must be seen exactly on those terms. All preceding revolutions in American life have presented the people with an existential moral choice. If there are battle lines to be drawn today, let us mark them between a civilization that defiles and kills children, and a civilization that cherishes every Child as sacred. Neither a civil war between elites, nor policies of reform, nor the slogan of economic class war can satisfy the deepest hunger of the people for change.
The revolutionary spark that began in Philadelphia in 1776 has already been far surpassed in the centuries since. Our city has been forever changed by the Black freedom struggle. Here, best of all places, the Black proletariat have proven their capacity to govern. This is a Black city, and we are better for it. Yet it is a city where the needs of the people are not met; where every flower of their creative genius is crushed. Philadelphia stands again at the vanguard of our nation’s consciousness, ready for reawakening. Now is the time for all institutions of the people to answer the call of history and uphold their responsibility to the people; not to play politics or seek fame, but to mobilize our communities into a new Movement of Civilization, what King called a revolution of values.
Key to all this must be an all-humanity struggle for Democracy, which has at its heart the struggle of ideas. For too long we have let the fate of civilization be dictated by courts of idiots and fools. The day has arrived when it must be claimed by the broadest mass of the people: intelligent and beautiful in their shared striving. We in the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation dedicate ourselves to the democratic struggle with the people to make such a movement possible.
Martin Luther King, Our Future
Martin Luther King is right: “We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, ‘Too late.’”
Today all people must choose the ground upon which they fight. In the final analysis we agree with the prophet of nonviolence, Rev. James Lawson, in placing our hopes with Black people as the bridge between a violent white civilization and a civilization that embraces world humanity. We take our stand with James Baldwin who challenged America to become the last nation that needs whiteness and its ideology; the last empire of the West; the place for a new beginning. We affirm that every American of goodwill is called to join in that destiny.
Let the age of Martin Luther King be born. Let our people develop a moral criteria and vision to govern themselves. Most of all, let us rediscover our divine struggle for a new world. By it, we will realize the true nature and purpose of modern Man as first revealed in the striving of the Black proletariat, who ask of the American experiment: Who is Man; who is God? We, who stand at the crossroads of time, are now called to form a cosmic partnership with eternity, to build a new heaven and a new earth.
We declare 2026 as a time to break silence, a time for the moral remaking of the American people. Let us now make freedom real.
Written by the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation. Find more information regarding the Free School’s activity in the 250th anniversary of America’s founding at saturdayfreeschool.org
Avant-Garde: A Journal of Peace, Democracy, and Science 
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