In celebration of Frederick Douglass’s birthday, the Washington Examiner has published a number of special essays on the topics of race, slavery, and the achievement of the United States’s highest ideals. This represents our collaboration with the Woodson Center to promote its new educational series, “1776.”

This project has brought together “an assembly of independent voices who uphold our country’s authentic founding virtues and values.” The writers of these essays, most of them black and all of them serious thinkers, come from ideologically diverse backgrounds. They are liberals, conservatives, academics, journalists, and activists. What they share in common is an aversion to the increasing infantilization of black America or the denial of blacks’ agency throughout their history. These writers share with one another a distaste for attempts at pseudoscholarship that would reduce all of U.S. history to a history of racism and all of black America to the permanent status of helpless victim.