There is no country on earth like these United States of America. With all of our contradictions, all of our scars, all of our struggles, I still believe this is the greatest place to be born, to dream, to build, to serve, and to become.
As I reflect on the 250th year of America’s birth, I cannot help but look at it through the lens of my own.
I was born in 1974 in East St. Louis, Illinois, one of the poorest cities in the United States. I later moved with my mother and siblings across the river to the city of St. Louis, where we lived for a period on the north side.
That is not an incidental detail in my life. It is part of the soil from which I came.
History tells us that East St. Louis, during this period, was in the aftermath of steep industrial and municipal decline. The city had once been honored as an All-America City. But by the 1960s, industries were leaving. Between 1960 and 1970, East St. Louis lost nearly 70 percent of its businesses. Unemployment rose. Residents left. The population drain continued for years.
By the time I was born, East St. Louis was not simply poor. It was a city that had helped power industrial America and then had been left with the consequences of deindustrialization: fewer jobs, a weaker tax base, diminished services, and concentrated poverty.
I write about this in my book, Twice Over a Man, because place matters. Where we are born shapes what we see, what we expect, what we fear, and what we dare to believe.
North St. Louis was living through the same broader urban crisis: population loss, private disinvestment, racial segregation, and the physical scars of urban renewal. I lived for a period in the projects. One of the symbols of that period was Pruitt-Igoe. Its first towers were demolished in 1972, just two years before I was born, and the demolition continued through the mid-1970s.
So in 1974, as America was preparing to celebrate almost 200 years of independence, the question in places like East St. Louis and North St. Louis was not whether liberty had been declared.
The question was whether liberty had been delivered.
Delivered into neighborhoods.
Delivered into schools.
Delivered into homes.
Delivered into jobs.
Delivered into banking.
Delivered into safety.
Delivered into opportunity.
That history was not abstract to me.
I was not born beside America’s contradictions. I was born inside them.
The decline of East St. Louis was not just a case study. The disinvestment in North St. Louis was not just an urban planning failure. The demolition of towers, the disappearance of jobs, the weakening of neighborhoods, the concentration of poverty, all of it formed the world that received me.
And when a child is born into that kind of world, the question of liberty becomes painfully practical.
Will someone see me?
Will someone protect me?
Will someone teach me?
Will someone open a door?
Will someone believe that my life has value before I have a title, a résumé, a bank account, or a story anyone wants to hear?
When I fast forward and think about my early childhood years, a young boy growing up in poverty, spending much of his childhood in the foster care system, struggling to understand what life would offer him , I realize I was living in the space between America’s promise and America’s delivery.
I did not know those words then.
I only knew what it felt like to be uncertain.
To be moved.
To be afraid.
To wonder whether the world was safe.
To wonder whether my future had already been decided by my beginning.
And yet, somewhere deep inside me, I reached for whatever hope I could find. Whatever potential was still alive. Whatever belief had not been crushed.
Looking back, I have to believe that some of what I was reaching for was the hope of America itself, not America as a perfect country, but America as a place where a child born into abandonment could still become more than his circumstances.
In 2019, I had the privilege of beginning my leadership role as CEO of Midwest BankCentre. I remember sitting on a plane headed to Washington, D.C., for a meeting and being struck by the weight of history. Just over 100 years before my birth, Frederick Douglass had become the first Black president of the Freedman’s Savings Bank, a financial institution created after the Civil War to serve formerly enslaved people.
And there I was, a foster kid from East St. Louis and North St. Louis, now entrusted to lead a bank.
I do not know how to tell that story without gratitude.
I also do not know how to tell it without truth.
Frederick Douglass understood that. When he was invited to speak about the Fourth of July in 1852, he chose to speak on July 5. He asked the searing question,
It was a hard question.
But it was not asked out of hatred for America’s ideals. It was asked because those ideals mattered enough to be taken seriously.
Douglass was not calling America worthless.
He was calling America higher.
That is the tension I feel on this birthday.
Today, as I join with my fellow men and women across this country, I remain proud to be an American. There is no other country where I would rather live. We have our challenges. We have our divisions. We have our wounds. But I still believe in the possibilities of this nation.
I have written and spoken before about the reality that the loudest voices often get the most attention, when it is the silent middle that may have more power than we give ourselves credit for.
People who do not want to destroy one another.
People who still believe decency matters.
People who still believe their neighbor’s child matters.
People who still believe that disagreement does not have to become hatred.
If our country is going to survive and thrive for another 250 years, we must come back to a common cause and a common bond.
I am struck by the military phrase: leave no man or woman behind. I do not say that from a political point of view. I say it from a human one, and from a moral one.
The things we do for the least among us determine the character of a nation.
Many hands make light work. If each of us did something small to help someone else carry the load, this country would feel different.
I have come to realize, as someone who came from very humble beginnings, that the acquisition of stuff is not ultimately what makes us happy. What gives life meaning is the potential we help unleash in our neighbors, our brothers, our sisters, our children, our coworkers, our communities, and even strangers whose names we may never know.
That is the work of citizenship.
That is the work of faith.
That is the work of love.
My hope for the next 250 years is that we draw nearer to one another, not farther apart. That we lean on God for wisdom and understanding. That when we are in doubt, we return to the greatest commandment: to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
If we made more decisions through the lens of love, we would make better decisions.
Not weaker decisions.
Not sentimental decisions.
Better decisions.
I believe we would create more shared prosperity for all people. I am not suggesting that everyone will acquire the same level of wealth. I am not suggesting that outcomes will ever be perfectly equal.
But I am suggesting that every person deserves a basic level of dignity, safety, opportunity, and care.
When I look at the arc of history and consider the societies that thrive and those that struggle, I see a simple truth: we must make space for all people to achieve a basic level of existence and possibility.
If only a handful of us make it, that is not sustainable.
If we only maximize for a handful of us, that is not sustainable.
We need to move away from the language of maximization for a few and toward the discipline of optimization for all.
That is not just economics.
That is morality.
That is sustainability.
That is America at her best.
I still have nightmares. I still struggle in ways people cannot always see. I still carry memories, wounds, and shadows from things I experienced as a child.
But I also still carry hope.
My hope rests in the Lord.
My hope rests in the possibility that people can change.
My hope rests in the belief that institutions can be turned toward human flourishing.
My hope rests in the conviction that America’s next chapter does not have to be defined by fear, division, cynicism, or scarcity.
We can choose something better.
So on this Fourth of July, as America turns 250, I do not celebrate because her story is simple.
I celebrate because her promise is still powerful.
But promises do not deliver themselves.
Declarations do not raise children.
Declarations do not rebuild neighborhoods.
Declarations do not open bank accounts, create jobs, heal trauma, strengthen schools, restore families, or give a young person reason to believe tomorrow can be different.
People do that.
Institutions do that.
Communities do that.
Leaders do that.
Neighbors do that.
And if we want America to endure for another 250 years, then we must do more than admire the declaration.
We must participate in the delivery.
We must deliver liberty into neighborhoods.
Deliver dignity into systems.
Deliver opportunity into schools.
Deliver capital into communities.
Deliver love into places that have learned to live without it.
Two hundred and fifty years is roughly 91,311 days.
If God grants this nation another 250 years, then we have 91,311 new mornings to decide what kind of people we will be.
Here’s to 250 more years.
And here’s to the sacred work of making America not only a nation that declares liberty, but one that delivers it.