The U.S. turns 250 in 2026. Let’s celebrate — and confront our painful past.

On July 4, 2026, the nation will celebrate the 250th anniversary of its founding. How should we here in Philadelphia, the birthplace of American democracy, mark the occasion?

This is the question we have been asking ourselves across civically engaged spaces for years now. From numerous committees, start-up organizations, and public debates, the question looms — and has gathered more urgency in recent months, as the country teeters in an election year that will determine what kind of democracy we will have in 2026, and for generations to come.

I’ve heard many suggestions to emulate the earlier anniversary milestones such as the 1876 centennial or 1976 bicentennial, creating similar opportunities for tourism and municipal investment. But we can’t view these historic commemorations through rose-colored lenses.

These previous anniversary celebrations were, in many ways, successful — but a deeper look shows how they also spotlighted the underlying contradictions of our city, where longings for freedom and persistence of inequity structure our everyday realities.

Consider, for instance, the story of the Richard Allen memorial, the only exhibition featuring and sponsored by African Americans permitted in the 1876 centennial, held a year before the end of Reconstruction. After the centennial celebration, Fairmount Park refused to allow the bust of Allen to remain there permanently, so it was sent to a university in Ohio, where it spent the next century most likely in storage. It didn’t return to Philadelphia until 2010.

Consider, too, when then-Mayor Frank Rizzo called for the National Guard to squelch protests during the 1976 bicentennial.

Two years away from the semiquincentennial, we find ourselves at another crossroads: How do we mark 2026 in a way that contends with some of our biggest social challenges — including inequity and division — in a revolutionary way?

This question is especially vital at a moment when we face ongoing challenges to the very fabric of our democracy. In the midst of an election year rife with consternation, where deep wounds of injustice persist and as threats to our multiracial democracy reign, what America will be in 2026 is far from settled.

As recent reports have shown, the city lacks funding to pull off a major celebration; Independence National Historical Park doesn’t have enough funding for necessary maintenance, let alone preparing for the semiquincentennial.

But our preparations are also dependent on moral currency.

Preparing for 2026 requires more than just party planning, but a reckoning with an unfinished democracy and systemic injustices that date back to our nation’s founding: the legacies of enslavement, dispossession of Indigenous lands, and racial and gender inequality. These are unhealed wounds that remain self-evident and hold back our progress and possibility. These are not matters of the far-off past but embedded within symbols and systems of our nation today.

Now, and especially as we struggle to keep our democracy intact, we must tend to these legacies through civic healing and repair.

Not everyone wants to confront our painful past. The clear, lucid, and candid telling of this full history is under threat from authoritarian forces who are working to re-entrench segregationist ways into American life. It appears they would rather curtail the full unvarnished telling of history than learn or heal from it.

As the saying goes, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Likewise, those who shut down the telling of our history are poised to doom us into dark times.

Do not get me wrong — the radical potential of joy and celebration in 2026 is profound. And, still, we need a vision for our city and country that unpacks our history in ways that bring catharsis and relief. We are bursting at the seams with grief. We need resources to process, grow, and transform together.

We are bursting at the seams with grief.

How we make room for our unhealed civic wounds in 2026 will define us as we strive to move forward.

To start, I believe we must look more deeply at how we got here — the unfinished and unfulfilled promise of the country. We can do this by boldly addressing our central contradictions with grace and clarity. Embracing the fullness of our history.

At Monument Lab, we have begun our 2026-related projects this year with Declaration House, featuring Sonya Clark’s public artwork The Descendants of Monticello, a collaboration with Independence National Historical Park and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello’s Getting Word African American Oral History Project.

This installation is staged at the site where Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, and penned a passage later removed by his colleagues in which he referred to slavery as a “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty.” The artwork features videos of the blinking eyes of the descendants of the over 400 people enslaved at Monticello, including those biologically related to Jefferson.

Other projects that offer similar approaches include Matthew Jordan-Miller Kenyatta’s The Museum of Hidden Genius: An Atlas of Afrotech, which chronicles the technologies developed by Black inventors, and the Sacred Red Rock Project, focused on returning a boulder sacred to the Kaw Nation back to its people in Kansas.

» READ MORE: Joint session of Congress at Independence Hall proposed for nation’s 250th anniversary

There is a lesson here — not just for Philadelphia and the U.S., but for our times of division and strife. If we want to have healing, learning, belonging, and true celebration for all, we must change our ways.

We must be called to the future by way of our past, tending to the gaps and erasures we have inherited. We must make room for our full history to breathe, thrive, and come to life through courageous conversation, art, and action. This is the only way we can animate democracy and make generational change.

Paul M. Farber is director and cofounder of Monument Lab. He also serves as senior research scholar at the Center for Public Art and Space at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design.