Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least 20 more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution — a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

were willing to do their part — through protests and struggle, on the

streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience

and always at great risk — to narrow that gap between the promise of

tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign — to continue the

long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more

chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I

believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless

we solve them together — unless we perfect our union by understanding

that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we

may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but

we all want to move in the same direction — towards a better future