Community Corner

Long Beach Patriot: 'We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident'

City resident reads America's founding documents aloud on boardwalk.

It’s commonplace to hear people on the Long Beach boardwalk talk each morning about everything from family matters to the previous night’s Yankees’ game, but come Monday something uncommon will be heard.

On Independence Day, from 10 to 11:45 a.m. at Neptune Boulevard boardwalk, boardwalk-goers will get to listen to these historical words read aloud: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union...”

City resident Barbara Horn will once again read the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights in their entirety, in celebration of America’s 235 birthday.

“It breaths life into the history of the documents,” Horn said about her reason for reading them audibly in public. “I think we should all hear or read the documents at least once a year.”    

At her first reading five years ago, Horn stood in a drizzling rain on the boardwalk and started to read the documents for anyone to hear. During this 90-minute session, a handful of passers-by stopped to listen, smiled and continued on.

The next year she had company and drew more notice. A volunteer at the Long Beach Adult Learning Center, Horn invited a woman who she was teaching to speak English to join her. The woman, her husband and their young daughters, immigrants from the Dominican Republic, traded off reading the Declaration.    
   
“It deepens the experience of the whole thing,” Horn said about the immigrants’ participation. “I mean, on some level, that’s what we all were in the beginning. The people who wrote the documents belonged to another country.”

That day, about two-dozen boardwalkers stopped to listen to Horn, and an elderly couple took part in reading the Constitution.   

More recently, she’s carried a table from home and posted a sing that reads: “Readers Welcome,” which has boosted participation. “I really encourage passers-by to read a section, if they feel so inclined,” she said.

In 2009, she invited women on the boardwalk to read when she go to the 19th Amendment, upholding a woman’s right to vote. On Monday, Horn, who calls herself “progressive” but declines to discuss politics at her readings, will again emphasize that amendment ratified 91 years ago.

She was originally inspired to take on this now annual reading after watching Republicans and Democrats debate the meaning of the Constitution on a political talk show.

The hottest political issues that July were the war in Iraq and immigration, and she was distraught over the political climate and sought grounding and clarification.

“Everyone was basically yelling ‘I’m right; no I’m right,” and I felt I needed to read it for myself, I felt I had to go back to the source, to what the Founders wrote,” she recalled.
     
And what do the documents represent to her?  

Said Horn: “We’re in this country where we have so much freedom and we should be enjoying it and celebrating it and making sure that it is experienced. It’s an exceptional context in which our lives take place.”  


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