I believe that the greatness of the United States is not rooted in the country’s original governing institutions. Nor is the nation’s genius located in its Founding Fathers whose destructive errors of judgement set the nation on a chaotic road to Disunion. 

The wisdom of America at its inception is properly rooted in its laboring classes and the remarkable array of social movements and traditions of resistance to tyranny and corruption that they established—and continue to establish in our own time. Foremost among these were insurgencies created by ordinary people who understood that their struggles were intimately tied to people’s movements against despotism throughout the world. 

In An African American and Latinx History of the United States, I call this phenomenon emancipatory internationalism. It was a worldview born from the experience of seeing slavery, “Indian Wars,” and militarism extinguishing liberty across the North American continent in the tumultuous decades after the American Revolution. The power of emancipatory internationalism would break the boundaries of the nation state repeatedly in the form of slave revolts, strikes, the creation of anti-colonial newspapers and other anti-authoritarian tactics. 

Dissenters passed on these traditions of resistance to future generations by establishing anti-slavery societies, mutual aid organizations, labor parties, trade unions and other free associations. African American leaders brought emancipatory internationalism to the forefront during Reconstruction when they organized a national movement to assist the Cuban War of Independence (1868-1878) arguing that their newly won freedoms were imperiled as long as slavery existed anywhere in the world.