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.
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