For many Americans, the country's 250th birthday is a celebration of history and a chance to tell a fuller story.
"We think about George Washington and the Founding Fathers as an exclusive history, when in fact, it's really an inclusive one. It's one that touches a lot of lives," Brendan Narcia told Scripps News.
Narcia is one of those people. An inaugural member of the League of Enslaved Descendants, he can trace his lineage to George Washington's enslaved community at Mount Vernon. His sixth great-grandmother, Doll, was an enslaved woman who lived and worked on the Virginia plantation.
"Doll had done so much, and her family had done so much in terms of aiding George Washington in the successful running of his estate and allowing him to do the work as the president, the first president of the United States," Narcia said.
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Doll arrived at George Washington's Mount Vernon in 1759 at the age of 38, Narcia said. She was the matriarch of her family and cooked meals for the Washingtons.
Narcia learned of that connection after a friend asked about a name in his own family history.
“A friend had asked me why my great-grandfather was named George Washington,” Narcia said.
Until then, Narcia said his family history was lost.
“I became humbled by the experiences they lived through and that it wasn't so glorified within our American history at all. It actually was not spoken about and that ended up being some of the reason why our family members didn't know about the history,” he said.
To Narcia, honoring America’s 250th birthday also means remembering people like Doll, whom he considers “a founding mother.”
"I see her in that same light as we celebrate a lot of these Founding Fathers, because without her and people like her, it wouldn't have happened," Narcia said. “Acknowledging that for others, for my descendants as well, I think is really important to keep our legacy alive and to allow people to know that they too have a stake in this founding of America.”
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That sense of urgency was echoed by Esosa Osa, founder and CEO of Onyx Impact, whose organization documented over 15,000 examples of attempts to erase Black history and Black progress within the first eight months of the second Trump administration.
"That number tells you that this is not by accident," Osa said. “That number tells you what it takes and how far people will go for power and control.”
“We cannot hope to ever achieve the promises of this country if we don't know where we are or where we come from, if we do not have any sense of what needs to be fixed, what needs to be improved, what needs to, how do we bend toward justice,” Osa said.
