"We Hold These Truths": An Honest Reckoning with the Constitution at NRM July 4

July 4, 1pm | Stockbridge, MA | Free outdoor program

The Norman Rockwell Museum and the Du Bois Freedom Center present the second annual "We Hold These Truths" on July 4, an all-day public program built around freedom, civil rights, and American democracy.

The free outdoor program starts at 1pm on the museum's terrace, opening with remarks from NRM Board Trustee Roberta McCulloch-Dews and Du Bois Freedom Center History and Interpretive Fellow Marcus Smith, whose introduction addresses both the Declaration's founding ideals and its original exclusion of women, Black, and Indigenous people. From there, thirty Berkshire County civic leaders take turns reading passages of the Declaration aloud — among them exhibition artist Irina Borisova, Great Barrington River Walk founding director Rachel Fletcher, former Rockwell model Ed Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois Regional Middle School principal Seth Lewis Levin, State Senator Paul Mark, Great Barrington Selectboard member Garfield Reed, and Mount Holyoke College historian D. Caleb Smith.

Inside the museum, the centerpiece is "American Stories: Revolution to Rockwell," the major exhibition tracing how American illustrators have shaped the country's visual self-image from the Revolutionary era to the present. Museum educators will lead highlight tours focused specifically on Rockwell's "Four Freedoms" paintings and the exhibition's section on art, democracy, and social justice, with folk singer Doug Miskin performing in the galleries alongside the tours.

Du Bois Freedom Center Interim Executive Director Dr. John D. Lloyd frames the event this way: the Declaration made a promise, and Du Bois never stopped pushing the country to keep it. Reading the document together two and a half centuries later, he's says, remains both a celebration and a challenge.

Following the reading, Berkshire musicians Wanda Houston and Rob Putnam perform "Songs of America: Freedom and Protest," tracing the role music has played in documenting the country's struggles and pushing its social justice movements forward.

The Du Bois Freedom Center, based at 309 Main Street in Great Barrington, is the first museum and living memorial in North America dedicated to the life and legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois. The partnership with Rockwell Museum puts two very different American visual and intellectual legacies in direct conversation with one another, asking visitors to reckon with both honestly.

Norman Rockwell Museum, 9 Glendale Rd., Stockbridge, MA. Outdoor program free; museum admission applies for galleries. More at nrm.org.