America’s freedom is not common. 1 It is not equally possessed. Instead, it is possessive, an elusive “wide-open” dream full of fractured tales of possibility. In contrast to its bucolic promises, America’s freedom evades even its most allegiance-minded proponents, offering divisive misnomers and mirages, a slippery concept fruitfully shared only in American imagination, seldom in living American “presents.” There is a particular American imagination that animates our understanding of civil rights. It was present in the ether around the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, often called the March on Washington, was also an economic declaration that articulated a dream of equitable rights and a vision for a world where living up to the American ideals of liberty and prosperity for all was genuine and feasible. A movement for civil rights focused on the concrete social, political, and economic protections that would allow every person to live as a full citizen of the United States of America. Civil rights are the practical conditions of liberty, the rights that make freedom equitable. From the nation’s founding to the March on Washington, the American project hinged on this shared premise: rights endure when the rules of the market are designed to include all. The shared premise is that rights on paper mean little without the material capacity to exercise them, and that markets drifting towards exclusion corrode the very freedoms they are meant to serve.

The uneven distribution of freedom is not an incidental feature of American life but a structural inheritance traceable to the founding itself, where constitutional promises of liberty and civic equality coexisted with entrenched systems of racial domination and hierarchical practices. The Founders’ republican ideals, rooted in claims about self-governance, civic virtue, and individual rights, were never conceptually prepared to address the conditions of racial hierarchy they sanctioned and reproduced.

This tension between a nation that proclaims freedom as universal and a reality in which freedom is structurally withheld leads back to: What do we hold in common, if not freedom? In this paper, I argue that to understand civil rights, we must pay attention to the commons, and commons not just as in common-pool resources, but commons as a practice of communal self-governance. The early American republic imagined itself as a political commons; a shared space of collective self-rule. Yet, poor people, women, Black, Brown, disabled, and queer folks were forced to create parallel civic institutional spaces because the American political commons was never designed to include them. Their institution-building—from independent newspapers, mutual aid societies, schools, churches, and political associations—constituted both a critique of the liberty of the nation’s founding and a deep commitment to it, through the reinvention of democratic life for all. These institutions challenged the Founders’ claims to egalitarianism by demonstrating, in practice, that liberty required structures different from those the early republic created. The commons have always been contested terrain, shaped by power, class, race, gender, and economic politics of exclusion. Within their limitations, Americans have always sought possibilities to sidestep propriety to secure legitimate access to power for survival, economic vitality, viability, and a fully actualized life beyond the state and the market. Ordinary people, driven by their will to survive, have pushed these functions even further.

To combat the disappointment of a limited commons, thinkers and organizers considered working from the bottom up and from within to influence democratic agency. Pressing past the market, freedom experiments were often successful failures that showed a radical new possibility of expansion and ownership. In the context of austerity, non-traditional economists, philosophers, and activists have returned to notions of self-governance, shared governance, shared leadership, and a decentered state, as functional vehicles for possible freedom, group-centered, and grassroots struggle. Possibility has always been wayward when thinking of a life beyond the democratic institution. Reflecting on 250 years of the United States, I approach the lived experience of American democracy, considering how individuals govern themselves. I consider the lived commons, shaped by less visible forces of power such as trust, participation, and shared responsibility.2 Here, the commons are the social infrastructures and relational practices through which people create shared spaces of decision-making, nurture collective capacity, and generate the conditions of freedom.

This article brings together the work of Ella Baker and Elinor Ostrom to explore the commons as a democratic practice. Reading Ostrom’s insights through Baker’s praxis, they challenge us to engage the quotidian critically and move towards a common good, freedom for all.

KEYWORDS: Civil Rights, Commons, Ella Baker, Elinor Ostrom, Self-governance