America has a big birthday this year. Here’s a hint: The celebration will not feel much like the last big one in 1976.

I still believe our nation’s best days are ahead. But our history — and our headlines — suggest we are facing a familiar test. Another fraught fight for freedom and democracy is already upon us. That, too, is part of a pattern. How America marks century anniversaries has looked different from how we mark the halfway points. The difference is not in the fireworks. It is whether we are expanding the idea of who belongs or shrinking it.

In 1776, the colonies declared independence from a monarchy and made a radical claim: All men are created equal. By 1826, that promise had narrowed, not widened. Slavery was more entrenched and brutal than at the founding. Congress outlawed the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, effective in 1808. But it did not weaken slavery. It intensified it. A vast internal slave trade tore families apart as enslaved people were sold further south to fuel cotton’s explosive growth. The nation celebrated Independence while perfecting a domestic machinery of human trafficking.

Another fifty years brought a different moment. In July 1876, the centennial told a more hopeful story. The party of Abraham Lincoln remained in power. The constitutional amendments guaranteeing citizenship and voting rights were part of the national narrative. Federal troops still protected black communities in the South. Much would change months later. But on the nation’s birthday, black America was living in an era defined by hard-won freedom. That pattern would repeat a century later.

In 1976, the bicentennial arrived in the midst of desegregation. The mood was reflective. Protest was understood as American. Reconstruction was no longer erased. The country celebrated what many called a second Reconstruction.

But in 1926 — America’s 150th birthday — the pattern broke the other way. The nation was in the grip of xenophobic, anti-Semitic, and racist backlash. White supremacist organisations wielded real political power. Racial violence and intimidation were facts of daily life. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories were mass-produced. Anti-Catholic campaigns targeted Irish, Italian, and eastern European immigrants.

All of it was wrapped in the language of “100 per cent Americanism”.

Let me be clear how far this rot went. Henry Ford spread anti-Semitic conspiracies through the newspaper he owned. Black veterans feared wearing their uniforms in public. The Ku Klux Klan was ascendant on anti-immigrant hate. Mainstream newspapers depicted Catholic immigrants as inherently criminal and dangerous to American society.

The sesquicentennial did not create these forces. It amplified them. Which brings us to now. If history is a guide, America’s 250th birthday will feel more like 1926 than 1976. The same currents are visible: immigrants from historically Catholic nations cast as threats, racism on the rise, anti-Semitic tropes revived, and Islamophobia inflamed. All in parallel. All dressed up as patriotism.

But history offers more than warning. It offers instruction. In 1926, the civil rights movement did something harder and more powerful than protest alone. It organised the nation’s conscience. Leaders claimed the ideals of the American Revolution not as nostalgia, but as goals the country was obligated to reach. They defined American patriotism as expanding freedom. They warned that those who would turn Americans into subjects — through violence, exclusion, or fear — were the real threat to the founding ideals. They called on their neighbours to build America up, not tear her down. That was not naïveté. It was strategy. It worked. Not overnight. But over time.

Fifty years after 1926 came 1976. Fifty years hence, if the pattern holds, America could be in a better place. The question is not whether history bends. It is who does the bending. America’s great birthdays do not measure how free we think we are. They measure how seriously we take the work undone. If we honour this birthday by recommitting to the fight for freedom — by widening democracy, not shrinking it; by confronting hate, not tolerating it — this celebration can become a hinge, not a warning. Because realising America’s promise is always the mission.

Ben Jealous is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, former president of the NAACP, and a direct descendant of the youngest combatant at the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

Ben Jealous