You didn’t sing the National Anthem, or fly the flag, or even light a firecracker. This Fourth of July celebration went on without you.
Sure, you appreciate being an American. Growing up, you recited the Pledge of Allegiance and studied the country’s history: the revolt against British rule, the Declaration of Independence.
Still, it was difficult in the segregated south to believe any of it applied to you. So your family, like others on Mexico Street in New Orleans, took the day to eat hot dogs, potato salad, chocolate cake, play dodge ball, generally commune with each other. No one dared to speak of liberty or death.
You and others were like Frederick Douglass, puzzled about why there was any expectation you would commemorate someone else’s history. “What, to the American Slave, is your Fourth of July,” Douglass asked in his July 5, 1852 speech. “I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham…; your national greatness, swelling vanity…; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery…”
Yes, you have come to understand that you and other African Americans own this country as much as anyone else. You earned your stake in it. You worked hard and believed deeper and perhaps more passionately in the concept of America, despite the contradictory behavior of those who called themselves leaders and the protectors of the country’s founding principles. And, a whole bunch of people in your family or the communities where you have lived, have died in foreign lands to keep the flag flying, allowing America to be called “the land of thefree.”
But who is free; where is this democracy, you ask yourself each Fourth of July. In the District of Columbia, a contradiction of a different sort continues.
Here, in a place that fancies itself as the epitome of Democracy, residents are without representation in their national government. Here, where the White House, the Capitol and the Supreme Court stand as iconographic reminders of the principles on which this country was founded; where residents are shipped off to wars; where they pay billions of dollars in taxes; and where people still believe in the Bill of Rights, residents are forced each day to reenact the country’s colonial beginnings.
What, you wonder, would George Washington say? Douglass’s comments would be what they were in 1852: “Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask … What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence?”
And a fine question that is even today. In good conscience you could never really celebrate the Fourth of July — until District residents gained the same democratic rights and independence as others in the country.
Jonetta Rose Barras is the political analyst for WAMU radio’s D.C. Politics Hour with Kojo and Jonetta. She can be reached at [email protected]
