- Declaration of Independence was a brilliant in one set document.

The Civil Rights Movement was able to move the country forward, because this document had in it all of the kernels that were necessary for us to plant the seeds of what was just and what was unjust.

- For the Civil Rights Movement, the phrase "All men are created equal" was the catalyst of the movement.

It was the most highlighted phrase.

- The Declaration of Independence becomes something that abolitionists used over the course of the 19th century, something that they turn to and that they critique.

- It acts as our guide from generation to generation, and it's all rooted in the traditions of freedom.

(dramatic music) ♪ Oh ♪ (people chatting) - When we talk about Black intellectual history, I think we're talking about solutions, creativity, writings, prose that are coming out of the struggle with either being enslaved or being in a community where many people look like you are enslaved.

- The Black intellectual were people generally speaking during that period, who had backgrounds in theology.

- We have, in the Black intellectual history of the Declaration of Independence, Lemuel Haynes.

- Haynes was a man of African descent from Massachusetts who served in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, and then later became a minister in Massachusetts.

- Haynes wrote an essay called "Liberty Further Extended" in 1776, and on the cover of this essay, he quoted the Declaration of Independence, and that second sentence that promises the life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and the equality that we now think of when we think of the Declaration of Independence.

- [Donald] The Free African Society, that was a very early civil rights organization.

- The Free African Society, many churches, provided material support to people, food, lodging, and direction on what's the next stop on the Underground Railroad.

- The Underground Railroad was a beautiful and complex system of individuals working together for one cause, which was to free people from enslavement all across the country, even globally, from the Caribbean, all the way out West, and even up to Canada.

- Philadelphia was the main destination for people trying to achieve their freedom.

We're the first major city just north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

- Richard Allen and Absalom Jones was born enslaved and lived in Philadelphia after purchasing freedom.

James Forten served as a sailor when he was a teenager during the Revolutionary War, aboard a private tier ship, worked as a sail maker in the city of Philadelphia, and became the wealthiest African American man in the United States, and became an abolitionist leader later in life.

- So from that time, all the way through the 1790s to Frederick Douglass and his famous oration in 1852, we can see this trajectory with Black freedom.

- He said, "What is your 4th of July to me?"

He says, "All I see is hypocrisy."

He said, "Give me atheism, give me infidelity."

All of that is better than what the Christians are giving me.

This is what he argues in this powerful speech, one of the greatest speeches ever given in America.

- Within the different strains of abolitionism, you know, there were all sorts of different ideas about what should happen with African Americans if they didn't indeed go free.

- The founders had different opinions on this.

Jefferson thought Black people needed to kind of be in their own community, that it wasn't possible to have an integrated society.

And then you have other abolitionists who are really pushing for full inclusion and citizenship in the United States.

- Arguably, the most famous invocation of the declaration during the civil rights era came in Dr.

King's speech during the March on Washington, where he frames the document as a promissory note.

He makes the argument that this was a promise the country had defaulted on regarding Black Americans.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

in the 1960s, sort of resets what it means to be an American, really provides the moral rhetoric for what it will be to have an interracial, pluralistic democracy.

- You have to give him credit.

He is that voice, not just of reason, but a voice of strong ethical understanding and underpinning.

- All of them from Martin Luther King, Jr.

Malcolm X, through to Barack Obama, were very essential with respect to not only philosophy, but relating that and turning it into activism, leading to the first African American president of the United States.

- He was a political clarification, and he was a moral clarification for the American nation, because we saw him as the best hope for the American society at that time.

- And there's this been this backlash of individuals who were unhappy with a person of African descent taking this office.

And I think we are still seeing the effects many years later.

- Whether it was reconstruction or the Civil Rights Movement or Barack Obama, in all three of those waves of advancement, we get new laws that are designed specifically to restrict African American voting.

And so it's hard to sort of completely weigh exactly how much we've really moved forward.

- [Molefi] We were essentially people who came to America with nothing, but were able to make a lot out of what we had.

So this was our strength.

We believe that there's nothing more important for human beings than to have that individual right to speak for freedom.

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