Beyond Loyalists and Patriots

Teaching Activity. By Tiferet Ani and Mimi Eisen. 2026. 27 pages.
In this mixer lesson, students surface choices and outcomes navigated by an array of Black and Indigenous people in the American Revolution to examine what freedom meant to those excluded from it at the U.S. founding.

The Declaration of Independence may be the most widely celebrated document in all of U.S. history. The quotes that most people know — that “all men are created equal” with rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” — are regularly cited as proof that the United States was built on a cornerstone of freedom and justice for all. And the founding fairy tales that infect countless textbooks, museums, and monuments paint the American Revolution as a righteous struggle of colonists in eastern seaports to unshackle themselves from British tyranny. But the culminating grievance of the Declaration tells another story. It takes aim at Black and Native Americans, defending the entrenchment of slavery and settler colonialism in the new United States.

The final grievance says of the British Crown: “He has excited domestic insurrections among us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” Here, in accusing King George III of inciting enslaved and Indigenous people to rise up against colonists, the Declaration’s signers condemned Black and Native Americans’ freedom and sovereignty. The so-called liberty championed in the Declaration rested on what sociologist Eve L. Ewing describes as the “original sins” of bondage, displacement, and genocide — “cornerstones that irrevocably shaped the social fabric of this nation.”

We created this mixer activity, “Beyond Loyalists and Patriots: Black and Native Americans Fight for Their Freedom in the U.S. War of Independence,” to help students examine these causes and varied impacts of the American Revolution on voices often stifled or erased from its commemorations. For most people, neutrality in the U.S. War of Independence was not an option, and they joined the side that seemed more likely to improve their lives. In the lesson, students surface choices and outcomes navigated by an array of Black and Indigenous people in the Revolutionary period. Through conversation, they explore what freedom meant to those excluded from it at the U.S. founding.

Roles for this lesson include: