By Virginia Scharff, Chair of Western History

On July 4, 2026, the United States will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. We approach this commemoration of democracy and human rights at a time when those rights are under threat. As a nation, we stand today at a moment that has generated uncertainty, fear, loss, danger, rage, pain, and that unlikely but nonetheless necessary feeling: hope. The men who signed the Declaration must have experienced similar emotions as they ventured into the unknown and made history. Two and a half centuries later, nowhere is that sense of stepping into the fast-moving stream of history more evident than right here in Los Angeles. 

For several years, the Autry Museum of the American West has been working on its contribution to the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Life, Liberty, and Los Angeles. The exhibition will show how the people of LA embody the United States in all its diversity. Individually and in our various communities, Angelenos have long worked to claim their “inalienable rights” to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Indeed, before and since there has been a Los Angeles, Indigenous peoples, immigrants, and emigrants have embraced their own versions of these values. 

We will draw on objects from our collections, loaned artifacts, newly acquired and commissioned works, and community collaborations to tell the multilayered stories of Angelenos who faced violence and fought back against discrimination, who exercised their rights to vote and serve in office, and who have pursued “the American Dream” of finding a home where they can live, work, and enjoy their leisure time as they wish. From an introductory soundscape where visitors can hear the sounds of Tongva life, to an early twentieth-century ballot box, to contemporary art representing past conflicts such as the Chinese Massacre of 1871, and from the 1992 Los Angeles uprising to today, Life, Liberty, and Los Angeles shows us how understanding American values from the viewpoint of this city reveals a nation founded on Indigenous land, shaped by immigrants and emigrants, that is always a work in progress. 

We like to imagine that our national story is one of increasing progress and ever-widening circles of inclusion and justice. But our freedoms have always been fragile. The course of human events does not run in a straight, upward-trending line. Rights once won must be defended repeatedly or be lost. We are once again challenged to rise to that defense, and to explain, as we do, what larger principles cause us to take action.

Americans have embraced, in the abstract, the idea that people possess “inalienable rights” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” These lofty words from the Declaration’s preamble embody a kind of national secular faith. But where and how do we make such aspirational values become reality? The Declaration of Independence specified a long list of human rights violations. Those grievances spelled out the conditions that led the Founding Fathers to take the immeasurably difficult step of fighting for their independence. Even those of us who know the Declaration well haven’t had a lot to say about those grievances; eighteenth-century problems have seemed far away. The signers objected that the king “has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures,” a complaint that might not have resonated with us, right up until the moment when armored vehicles began to roll down Wilshire Boulevard, when federal agents clad in riot gear and National Guard on horseback chased children through MacArthur Park in the midst of what had been a relatively peaceful day in LA.  

Who could have anticipated that Life, Liberty, and Los Angeles would open at a moment when LA has become the epicenter of national struggles over where and how American democracy can continue to exist? Suddenly, it seemed, heavily armed men in masks were in the streets, at stores, at workplaces, and in homes, grabbing immigrants and citizens alike without due process. Passengers waiting for a bus in Pasadena and a landscaper father of three Marines were snatched up and sometimes roughed up, fearing for their lives. People were hunted down from hiding spots in their houses or left LA altogether. When we read the Founders’ complaints that the king had “sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people,” their words have the feeling of a prophecy. 

Indeed, more than a few of those original grievances ring all too clearly. Take, for example, the Founders’ objection to the king’s “quartering large bodies of armed troops among us,” or “depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury,” or of “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences” in this era of disappearance and deportation. The grievances section also called out the king’s efforts to restrict immigration to the colonies, and specifically to obstruct “Laws for the Naturalization of Foreigners.” 

But as our exhibition will demonstrate, Los Angeles history is immigration history. The diverse peoples of Los Angeles have a long history of joining in struggles over immigration, on all sides. Their views and actions have shaped national politics. Throughout Life, Liberty, and Los Angeles, we explore how Angelenos have repeatedly fought over who among us is entitled to inalienable human rights, from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Mexican Deportations of 1931, from Proposition 187 in 1994 to the first “Day Without an Immigrant” protest in 2006. 

Perhaps Los Angeles has been targeted by the federal government because it is, in its global cultural diversity, in its historical role as the city of “the American Dream,” in its perpetual affinity for reinvention, not a place apart from “real America,” but instead, maybe the most American place in the United States today. It is fitting that we seek to understand the current national crisis by looking to our local history. The original signers of the Declaration were all property-owning white men, but they laid down principles that belong to all of us, and Los Angeles knows that. Life, Liberty, and Los Angeles will explore the city’s historic role as a proving ground for testing and retesting claims to American identity, equal rights, and to “the American Dream” itself, reminding visitors that this time of trouble is not entirely unprecedented. Angelenos have always known what they had to do to fight for their rights. Knowing our history can give us the tools and inspiration to carry that fight into an uncertain future.