New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani marked America's 250th anniversary with a speech reflecting on the nation's founding ideals, immigration, and the meaning of American exceptionalism.
Speaking from behind George Washington's desk and joined by newly naturalized U.S. citizens, Mamdani highlighted New York City's historic role in the American story while calling for a renewed commitment to the principles of liberty and equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.
His remarks come amid ongoing national debates over immigration, identity, and the future of American democracy, making the anniversary address a significant political moment.
Watch the full speech and key highlights from Mayor Zohran Mamdani's address marking 250 years of America.
#ZohranMamdani #NYCMayor #America250 #America250th #DeclarationOfIndependence #AmericanHistory #Immigration #NewYorkCity #AmericanExceptionalism #USPolitics #July4 #IndependenceDay #BreakingNews #PoliticalSpeech #NYCNews #USNews #Democracy #AmericanValues #GeorgeWashington #America
~PR.460~HT.408~ED.194~VG.HM~
Speaking from behind George Washington's desk and joined by newly naturalized U.S. citizens, Mamdani highlighted New York City's historic role in the American story while calling for a renewed commitment to the principles of liberty and equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.
His remarks come amid ongoing national debates over immigration, identity, and the future of American democracy, making the anniversary address a significant political moment.
Watch the full speech and key highlights from Mayor Zohran Mamdani's address marking 250 years of America.
#ZohranMamdani #NYCMayor #America250 #America250th #DeclarationOfIndependence #AmericanHistory #Immigration #NewYorkCity #AmericanExceptionalism #USPolitics #July4 #IndependenceDay #BreakingNews #PoliticalSpeech #NYCNews #USNews #Democracy #AmericanValues #GeorgeWashington #America
~PR.460~HT.408~ED.194~VG.HM~
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Good morning, my fellow Americans.
00:03Season after season, year after year, the tides have come in and out of New York Harbor.
00:10Long before the name New York had ever been spoken, Lenape dugouts crossed these currents.
00:16It was on these waters that tall masts crested the horizon,
00:20captained by explorers like Verrazano and Hudson, after whom we've named our bridges and rivers.
00:25And ever since, ships full of travelers weary from long journeys have passed through the narrows,
00:32the winds of the Atlantic at their backs.
00:34When those passengers lifted their heads to glimpse what lies just beyond the waves, what did they see?
00:41They saw land, lush and teeming with life.
00:45They saw men waiting at the docks to take them into bondage.
00:49They saw tenements, rife with squalor.
00:51They saw industry rumbling with activity, steam and smoke rising, a city on the move.
00:57They saw a towering monument to freedom, her torch glowing worldwide welcome.
01:03They saw New York City.
01:05They saw America.
01:07Tomorrow, our nation marks 250 years since we declared our independence.
01:13250 years of a grand experiment in self-governance.
01:17An experiment so audacious that some in 1776 doubted it would last more than a few years,
01:24let alone a quarter of a millennium.
01:26From Lexington to Los Angeles, Selma to Seneca Falls,
01:30Morrisania to Midwood, Americans will come together for a day, just as we do each year.
01:36Families will gather around the grill.
01:39Fireworks will fill the night sky.
01:41This will be no ordinary day of celebration.
01:44250 years presents a rare opportunity for more than 340 million people to turn together,
01:51both towards one another and towards ourselves, to take measure of who we are as a nation.
01:58When we look at America, what do we see?
02:01Here at City Hall, as I sit behind George Washington's desk,
02:05alongside new Americans who came to this country,
02:08I cannot see all of America.
02:10But like so many who came before, I can see New York City.
02:14The city I see today looks very different than the one that greeted George Washington.
02:19In July of 1776, our city simmered under the yoke of oppression.
02:24The British had imposed a colonial rule so repressive that 250 years ago, 80 miles south,
02:30a small group of newspaper editors, farmers, and soldiers signed their names on a document
02:35declaring truths that feel self-evident now, but were revolutionary then,
02:40establishing the ideals our nation still strives to fulfill.
02:43The British did not take it well.
02:45War broke out.
02:47And that August, as the largest battle of the Revolutionary War unfolded in Brooklyn,
02:51batteries on Governor's Island took aim at British ships anchored just offshore.
02:55We were outgunned.
02:57We were outmanned.
02:58And we were soundly defeated.
03:00After only a few months, it appeared our fledgling attempt at democracy was on the
03:05precipice of collapse.
03:06But that night, with the moon overhead, thousands of our soldiers silently climbed into ferries
03:12and flat-bottom boats and escaped to Manhattan.
03:16The Continental Army survived to fight another day.
03:20Independence may have been declared in Philadelphia, but it was rescued in New York City.
03:25George Washington was the last to leave Brooklyn.
03:27As he waited at the river's edge, the sun beginning its rise, he would have looked out
03:32over New York City's waters and seen what so many have seen in the 250 years since,
03:37an opportunity to begin anew.
03:40Those opportunities, like everything in New York City, are not given.
03:45They are won.
03:47In 1838, 11 years after New York outlawed slavery, a recently emancipated black man by the name
03:52of James Weeks sought to begin anew as well, and to help hundreds of others do the same.
03:58He bought property in Brooklyn, won himself the right to vote, and sold lots to others
04:02newly freed.
04:03When they landed in New York Harbor, they knew they had something waiting for them that they
04:07had never had before, a home.
04:11Weeksville still stands today, a living, breathing testament to what we know America to be,
04:16a place each of us has the power to make.
04:20The harbor was busy those years, as ships poured in from around the world.
04:24Hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants arrived with stomachs aching from a famine
04:29manufactured by imperial cruelty.
04:31Chinese sailors settled in what is today Chinatown.
04:34Millions more traveled under the Statue of Liberty and through Ellis Island.
04:37Jewish people escaping pogroms.
04:39Italians fleeing poverty.
04:41Syrians seeking economic opportunity.
04:44Each of these new arrivals peered through portholes onto a city that was changing as fast as the
04:49nation.
04:49They saw merchants peddling their wares on the docks, streets being laid out on a grid,
04:55buildings rising into the clouds.
04:57They could not yet see the nativism they would face, the jobs they would be refused,
05:02the landlords who would not rent to them, and the abject labor and living conditions they
05:06would withstand.
05:07But no matter how much smog hung over the harbor, they still saw an opportunity to begin anew.
05:13Over the years that followed, despite laws enacted by the federal government to bar their
05:17entry, despite sweatshop fires that killed hundreds of women, despite riots aimed at
05:22their very existence, immigrants made homes here in New York City, and they helped to make
05:27New York City.
05:28That legacy of every generation of Americans insisting that the right to life, liberty,
05:33and the pursuit of happiness extends to them too, is no relic of the past.
05:37It carried millions of black Americans north during the Great Migration.
05:42It drew hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans to New York City after the Second World War.
05:46It invited countless others from the West Indies and South Asia and West Africa and across
05:50the world.
05:51And it is what brought my family to the city when I was seven years old.
05:55My family did not arrive by boat, although we saw the Statue of Liberty from the window of
05:59the plane.
06:00Even from the air, we could make out the promise of America, the promise of the beautiful patriotic
06:05work of rendering America, year after year, a little more faithful to its founding ideals.
06:11There is a term so often used to describe our nation and those who have shaped it, American
06:16exceptionalism.
06:17American exceptionalism, the conventional wisdom tells us, makes our freedom a little more
06:22free, is how we dug the Erie Canal and irrigated the West, is why children in faraway lands
06:27grow up dreaming of one day moving here.
06:29And yet the irony is that the story of America has so often been written by those who were
06:34told by others with power and influence and wealth that they were anything but exceptional.
06:39For generation after generation, we have been told that when the world has sent its people
06:44to our shores, it has not sent its best.
06:47It sent Puritans and Sikhs and Quakers and Muslims and Jewish people who were banished for
06:52praying the wrong way, worshiping the wrong gods, angering the wrong people.
06:56It sent peasants and serfs from slums and shtetls who were treated as less because they
07:01hardly owned clothes, let alone land.
07:03It sent immigrants from whom power was something someone else had.
07:07We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than
07:14everyone else.
07:15The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here nothing is fixed into place.
07:21The frontier may be closed.
07:23We may have walked on the moon.
07:25But the work of fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence,
07:29that work endures.
07:31And it belongs to us all.
07:33It belongs, too, to our newest Americans, those standing here with me today, all of whom
07:38were recently naturalized.
07:40Nearly a decade ago, I, too, felt what you feel, the joy of no longer being just a New
07:45Yorker, but an American, too.
07:48You each hold a special power, the power to determine what America means.
07:53The powerful have always known their answer.
07:56America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom,
08:01where not all are created equal.
08:03America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes.
08:08America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right
08:12shade of skin, the rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed
08:16to visit.
08:17How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal.
08:21At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to
08:27win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another.
08:31Division is the oldest trick in politics and the cheapest.
08:35But time and again, including 250 years ago, those forces of division have been vanquished
08:42by the forces of progress.
08:44As Thomas Paine once wrote, this new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers
08:50of civil and religious liberty.
08:51Hither have they fled.
08:53And yet today, too many of our leaders do not believe in a vision of this nation as an
08:59asylum for the persecuted, but rather as one that persecutes those seeking asylum.
09:04As we mark 250 years, what do we see?
09:09We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions.
09:14We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world, one where children go to sleep
09:18hungry while the world's first trillionaire hungers for more.
09:22We see monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections.
09:28We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors
09:33before spiriting them away in unmarked vans.
09:36We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked
09:41hands, those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone.
09:46And we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft
09:51hands of a precious few.
09:53Yes, we see America in a health insurance industry that exploits the sick, but that is
09:58not all we see when we look for America.
10:00We see it, too, in the nurse who works a double shift and then stops on our way home to
10:05check
10:05on an ailing neighbor.
10:07Yes, we see America in corporate landlords for whom negligence is a business model.
10:10We see it, too, in the father who tucks his children into bed beneath a ceiling stained
10:16with leaks, who wakes before dawn to go to work and still believes his country can do
10:21better by his family.
10:22Yes, we see America when we spend our tax dollars on bombs and bailouts, when we sell our elections
10:28for the highest bidder.
10:30Yet we see it just as clearly in every American who still believes this country belongs to
10:35we, the people.
10:36We see America each time neighbors link arms with neighbors without asking how long they
10:41have lived here or what papers they have as ice invades our neighborhoods.
10:45We see America each time those young and old stand in the beating rain or the stifling
10:50heat to cast their ballots.
10:51We see America each time working people demand more, not just for themselves, but for their
10:57fellow Americans.
10:58There are some who respond to those who ask for more from America with a simple refrain.
11:04Love it or leave it, they say.
11:06But patriotism has never been about pretending our nation is without flaws.
11:11Patriotism is every act of righteous dissent.
11:14It is every march led under the heavy sun.
11:16It is every protest held a decade before its time.
11:19It is precisely because we love this nation that we will not leave it.
11:24After all, who loves America more than those who have sacrificed so much to make it free?
11:30Today, I think not only of the 4th of July.
11:32I think two of the 9th of July.
11:35Five days after the Declaration of Independence was signed, it arrived here in our New York City.
11:41Redcoats had disembarked on Staten Island.
11:43More than 100 British ships loomed just offshore.
11:46Across this city, the Continental Army prepared for an invasion.
11:50George Washington commanded his brigades to assemble just a few feet from this building.
11:56It was known then as the Commons.
11:58Today, we call it City Hall Park.
12:01There, within range of British guns, Washington ordered his generals to read the declaration aloud.
12:07And with the world's mightiest empire poised to attack, Washington told the people of New York City what we will
12:14celebrate tomorrow, that we had declared our independence, that freedom was within reach.
12:21That evening, danger loomed.
12:23Conflict was not a question, but a certainty.
12:26And yet, when those early New Yorkers marched toward the statue of King George III that stood in the Bowling
12:32Green, a statue they would melt down into bullets for their young army, they walked in unison, grounded not in
12:39the pursuit of plunder, but in ideals that for the first time had a name, America.
12:45Those ideals upon which our nation was built, they are strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if
12:52we reach for them.
12:53Ours is a nation working each day towards the perfection in which it was conceived, a nation striving each day
13:01to better itself.
13:02Therein lies the work of America, the striving, the bettering, the reaching towards perfection.
13:09What a privilege each of us has to live in a nation that every one of its inhabitants can shape.
13:15What a responsibility each of us possesses to prove ourselves worthy of all those who came before.
13:21What power each of us holds to bring America ever closer to the greatness so many have seen when they
13:29looked upon these shores.
13:30The greatness that for 250 years has been America.
13:36God bless America.
13:38God bless New York City.
13:39And happy 4th of July.
13:44Subscribe to OneIndia and never miss an update.
13:49Download the OneIndia app now.
Comments