My two boys recently got new passports. The little books are gorgeously designed.

On thick paper, drawings are etched of wheat fields and farmers, statues and monuments. Quotes from great Americans — former Presidents George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, as well as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., — top each page. The security measures are a marvel of modern ingenuity: watermarks and holograms, color-changing ink, stamps and microtext. Combined, it represents a vision of what the United States of America is, or, increasingly, what it should be.

Admiring the artistry and the technology of the passport, I flipped through to the end. There, I came upon a quote, the only one inside from a woman:

“The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class — it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.”

The quote was from a woman named Anna Julia Cooper, a writer, scholar and speaker born into slavery who died in 1964 at the age of 105. Despite having to pause her studies to adopt her five nieces and nephews after their mother’s death, Cooper would go on to an illustrious career in academia and education, becoming the fourth Black woman in American history to earn a PhD.

Somehow, her quote in our passports had escaped the brutal federal excise of anything that hints at diversity. I had never heard of Cooper before reading that quote, but I was inspired to learn more about her.

I found a speech, preserved by Howard University scholars, that Cooper had delivered to a conference of Quakers in 1902. In it, she talked about the duty of our country to live up to its declared aims of equality.

“A nation,” she said at the time, “cannot long survive the shattering of its own ideals. Its doom is already sounded when it begins to write one law on its walls and lives another in its halls.”

I’ve currently just finished rereading “Animal Farm,” part of an attempt to take a second shot at my high school English curriculum. I’ve learned that only as an adult am I able to fully absorb the wisdom inside some of these books.

I don’t know how I could have understood the universal truths inside George Orwell’s brutal takedown of totalitarianism as a teenager.

Yadda, yadda, yadda, pigs, was all I remember thinking at the time.

Now, though, I can’t stop thinking of Squealer, the propagandist pig in the book who sneaks into the barn in the middle of the night to alter the commandments of Animalism written on the wall.

It was necessary, that subterfuge of Squealer’s: the undoing of their ideals.

I see echoes of that in Cooper’s speech — that our ideals are powerful, but our hewing to them is fundamental. When we abandon them, when our values are merely words on a wall to be changed in a midnight sneak, that is when our society begins to crumble.