Remember the Preamble

“We the People of the United States…”
The most famous mission statement in political history opens with unity — and begins with a lie.

When those words were signed into being in 1787, We the People did not include:

• Women
• Enslaved people
• Native nations
• The landless poor
• Non-Protestants, and often not Catholics or Jews
• Certainly not immigrants, unless they were white and English-speaking

And yet — the Preamble became the moral spine of the republic.

It promised a nation built not on bloodlines or borders, but on ideals:
Justice. Tranquility. Welfare. Liberty.
For the people. All the people. Eventually.

The Genius of a Lie That Became a Compass

The Constitution was a compromise — and like all compromises, it bore the weight of hypocrisy.
But the Preamble was different. It wasn’t law. It was vision.
And vision has power.

It gave abolitionists the language to fight slavery.
It gave suffragists the language to demand the vote.
It gave civil rights leaders the right to say:

You promised this. You wrote this. You signed your name to it.

Even if the founders didn’t live up to their own ideals — they left them behind for someone else to claim.
And generation after generation, Americans have returned to the Preamble to measure how far we’ve come — and how far we still have to go.

The genius of the Preamble is not that it was true in 1787. It’s that it continues to call us forward. It continues to ask: What kind of people do we want to be?

This Is What We Do at Remember the Preamble

At Remember the Preamble, we don’t romanticize the past.
We remember it.
And in remembering, we reclaim the Preamble as a living document — not a relic.

We ask:

• Who was excluded?
• Who expanded the circle?
• Who still feels left out?

That’s the civic conversation we’re inviting through essays, videos, and public questions.
Because remembering isn’t just about the past.
It’s about the future we the people are still trying to build, the genius of the Preamble.

• Read the full text of the U.S. Constitution and Preamble
• Explore the Library of Congress exhibit on “Creating the United States”
• Learn how Frederick Douglass reframed the Constitution as a tool for abolition
• See how the Preamble was cited in early women’s rights conventions
• Read how Martin Luther King Jr. and others invoked the Constitution in the civil rights era