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"It is worth remembering just how radical the whole idea of self-government really was back in 1776. To that point, human history was a tale of conquest and caste and rigid hierarchies. A world where the strong dominated the weak, where power and wealth and status flowed through lineage, and the many were ruled by the few. But out of the fire and steel of a revolution, a different story took flight. On this continent, a declaration that we are all created equal, endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, and that in the newly independent United States there will be no kings or lords, no serfs or subjects, but only citizens, each of us free to pursue our own version of happiness and able to determine our collective fate through an elected representative government. It had not been done, and because it hadn't been done before, the success of this experiment was never a given. In forming our union, the founders felt terribly short of the declaration's promise, leaving slavery intact, allowing states to restrict the franchise to white men who owned property. But in drafting a constitution and a bill of rights, they did have the foresight, the genius, to provide us with a framework that allows each generation to make our union more perfect. In over more than two centuries, through petitions and protests, marches and strikes, moral appeals from the pulpit and conversations at the family dinner table, men and women from all walks of life, of every color, every faith, every region, took up the cause of democracy and made it their own until we, the people, came to include not just some of us, but all of us. And that's why the story we tell in this building begins not with Michelle's origins or my origins, but with our nations, with a founding or a print of the Declaration of Independence."
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