As we mark the 250 years of America, we must tell the stories that freedom has tried to bury

Cities are built on stories, but too often, we are also a city and nation of selective memory.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, Philadelphia stands at a crossroads. This isn’t just the birthplace of the republic — it is the birthplace of contradictions. A city of revolution and redlining. Of William Penn’s utopian grid and MOVE’s charred remains and the resilience of Mike Africa. Of Ben Franklin and W.E.B. Du Bois. Of historic proclamations and suppressed narratives.

And what we choose to celebrate — or erase — in this moment will define whether our commemorations are instruments of justice or tools of amnesia.

Across the arc of my writing — from essays challenging our cultural institutions to reckon with the artists they tokenize, to opinion pieces mourning the engineered regression of Black mobility — I’ve returned to a core question: What do we choose to remember, and what does our forgetting cost us?

To understand the stakes, we must go beyond murals and monuments.

We must remember Hakim’s Bookstore on 52nd Street — not just as a business, but as a battlefield. Founded by the late Dawud Hakim in the 1950s, it was one of the earliest Black-owned bookstores in the country, a lighthouse for diasporic knowledge, political awakening, and Afrocentric self-determination.

But to J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, it was a threat. Under COINTELPRO — the bureau’s once top secret surveillance program — agents monitored Black bookstores across the country, including Hakim’s, labeling them “outlets for revolutionary and hate publications.” Patrons were watched and photographed.

Hakim was investigated as if truth-telling were terrorism. He would later say, bitterly, that the FBI was wasting taxpayer money: “They should have been watching the drug dealers, not the people trying to liberate their minds.”

Let that settle in. In a country that celebrates the right to read and speak freely, the federal government deployed resources to disrupt a bookstore because it dared to center Black liberation.

This is the living archive we are summoned to remember.

And Hakim wasn’t alone. The Church of the Advocate, a Gothic cathedral nestled in North Philly, became a sanctuary not just in faith but in radical imagination. Its walls were adorned with the revolutionary murals of artist Richard J. Watson — vivid, unapologetic depictions of the Black struggle for justice.

This was not the stained glass of empire. This was art as testimony, as weapon, as scripture.

In 1968, the church hosted the National Conference on Black Power. Two years later, it was home to the Black Panther Convention. Jazz musicians jammed under the crucifix. Activists strategized in pews. It was also the site of the ordination of the first female priests in the Episcopal Church — another blow to the false binaries of sacred and profane, tradition and change.

This is the Philadelphia that the tourism brochures don’t tell you about.

Chinatown — America’s second-largest Chinese enclave — is still treated as a detour and not a destination. We marvel at its dumplings and lanterns, but ignore the generational resistance it has mounted against displacement, surveillance, and civic neglect.

It is a portal, not a food court. An ecosystem built on labor, kinship, and mutual aid. A living rebuke to the exclusion acts of yesterday and the development schemes of today.

The American dream, if it exists at all, is being kept alive in places like this — under siege and still singing.

Or consider the so-called Italian Market. South Ninth Street’s hustle and flavor wouldn’t survive a single season without the creativity, resilience, and labor of diasporic communities — Mexican, Central American, and Southeast Asian workers, who open shops before dawn and close them after midnight.

The current administration’s punitive policies toward these communities aren’t just cruel — they’re hypocritical. We celebrate the vibrancy their labor sustains, then turn around and criminalize their presence.

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Last year in Mexico, I felt an embarrassment I couldn’t name at first — until I found myself sitting quietly in a cafe in Oaxaca reading The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio. Her prose seared through me. It forced me to reckon with the weight of my passport, the freedoms I carry, and the stories I’ve overlooked.

The vibrancy of culture, the depth of art, and reverence for ancestry I experienced in Mexico City and Oaxaca lit something in me. I moved through the streets unburdened, uncamouflaged. My spirit felt light in a way that it rarely does in the nation my lineage helped build.

Back home, I am conditioned to contort — my voice, my posture, my presence — just to feel safe, or legible, or worthy of the space I’m in. Abroad, I felt fully human. And that disparity is the real indictment.

One afternoon in Oaxaca, I stumbled upon Biblioteca Infantil, a children’s library tucked away behind an unassuming gate. The space was architecturally thoughtful, whimsical, warm.

A free, public library designed with children’s dignity and imagination at the center. Not as an afterthought, but as a priority.

Books in multiple languages. Reading nooks with cushions and filtered sunlight. Rotating art exhibits. A sacred temple for youth and literacy without the bureaucracy, surveillance, or austerity we’ve normalized in even our most “well-resourced” school districts here in the U.S.

It made me ask: What would it take for America to love its children — not just the idea of them, but their full potential — this radically, this beautifully, this freely?

It felt … impossible. And then it made me furious that it feels impossible in a country as wealthy as ours. But, of course, it’s not about money. It’s about values. Oaxaca’s library wasn’t built from surplus, it was built from intentionality.

What we choose to remember shapes what we are allowed to imagine.

So, let us imagine differently.

Let us imagine an anniversary year where we tell the whole story — of Hakim and the historian next door, of Watson’s brushstrokes and the undocumented dreamer behind the bodega counter.

Let us imagine public art not as decoration, but declaration. Let us imagine memory not as performance, but infrastructure.

Author and scholar Christina Sharpe calls this “wake work” — the ethical labor of remembering within systems built to forget. To honor what we have lost, and what we are losing, not with eulogies but with action.

If we are to become a just nation, we must do more than celebrate independence. We must interrogate interdependence. Reconcile our contradictions. And tell the stories that freedom tried to bury.

Because in the end, memory is a choice. And we are what we choose to remember.

Tayyib Smith is a cultural strategist, entrepreneur, advocate for arts-driven economic development in Philadelphia, and founding partner at the Growth Collective.