Governor Stein’s July Column: Carrying the Baton of Freedom Forward

This month Governor Josh Stein is sharing a 4th of July message for America’s 250th birthday. Media outlets are invited to publish the column below from Governor Stein. 

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North Carolina has long been known as the First in Freedom State, and as America marks 250 years since our founding, freedom is both our inheritance and our responsibility. 

Our founders’ place in our history is worthy of acclaim. They wrote the Declaration of Independence proclaiming that all people are created equal; that God endowed us with rights that cannot be taken from us; and that we the people choose our government, which exists to protect those rights. Of course, our young nation did not fully live up to those ideals, and over the past 250 years, generations of Americans grabbed the baton of freedom and carried it forward. They are the ones who never stopped pursuing a more perfect union – one that lives up to our founding promises: equality, freedom, and democracy. That includes North Carolinians, who at important moments in our history have run critical legs of the race.  

Months before the 13 colonies declared independence, a group of North Carolinians led by Cornelius Harnett gathered in Halifax on April 12, 1776, with the audacity to believe that they could govern themselves. They adopted the Halifax Resolves, making North Carolina the first colony to formally call for independence from Great Britain and earning our proud moniker: First in Freedom. Before there was a Constitution, before there was even a country, these patriots were willing to stake everything on the simple belief that political power belongs to the people. Harnett gave his life for independence. But these North Carolinians lit a spark in Halifax that helped illuminate a nation. 

Yet the work of fulfilling America’s founding promises was only beginning, as the light of liberty did not reach the millions held in slavery and so many others. North Carolinians answered the call and moved our nation closer to its founding promises. Wilmington native Abraham Galloway was born into slavery and escaped to freedom by hiding on a northbound ship. He served as a Union spy during the Civil War and urged President Lincoln in person to grant Black men the right to vote. After the war, he shaped a new North Carolina, and as a state Senator, he helped to ratify the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. He also championed women’s suffrage, recognizing that the work of freedom was still unfinished. 

Others picked up that baton. Gertrude Weil, the daughter of Jewish German immigrants who made Goldsboro home, founded the North Carolina Equal Suffrage League. Alongside women across the nation, she helped secure the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote. Decades later, Greensboro native Henry Frye returned home after serving his country in the Korean War only to be denied the right to vote because of the color of his skin. This injustice spurred him to become a lawyer, North Carolina's first Black elected state legislator in more than 80 years, and later the state’s first Black Chief Justice. From the General Assembly and our highest court, he helped purge North Carolina law of Jim Crow.  

For 250 years, millions of Americans have had the boldness to believe that, even when things were at their bleakest, they could make them better – that they could turn promises on paper into freedoms fulfilled. They have passed the baton from one to the next, carrying the cause of liberty farther than where they found it. Each generation has been asked the same question: Will we leave our democracy stronger than we found it? 

Then and now, the answer must be yes. And I know that North Carolina will continue to say yes because we are patriotic to our core. Our patriotism is found in servicemembers risking their lives to defend our freedoms, teachers investing in their students, farmers feeding our communities, factory workers making lifesaving medicine, law enforcement officers protecting our neighborhoods, and public servants quietly keeping our democracy functioning. We live out our patriotism daily through our service to one another and to our country. That is democracy in its most essential form: not something we save for the history books, but something we live in our daily lives.     

Being First in Freedom is not simply about what happened 250 years ago. It is about what we choose to do today. Let’s cherish our democracy, treat one another with dignity and respect, and remember that freedom, justice, and opportunity bind us together as Americans. Let’s be inspired by our national motto – E Pluribus Unum – out of many, we are one. Let’s carry forward the legacy entrusted to us and become a united United States of America. That is how North Carolina will honor our First in Freedom tradition and lead America into its next 250 years. Let’s pick up the baton of freedom and keep running.