What the Fourth of July Reveals About the Unfulfilled Promise of America

Every July fourth, two things are sure to happen. The first is that a buddy is going to post his annual rant to social media.

“It is not ‘the Fourth of July.’ It is Independence Day,” he’ll write. “That’s what we are celebrating. Independence.”

He’s making the point that we should call the observance by its name rather than by the date it occurs on. It’s followed by a pithy and sometimes irreverent flourish about why the Fourth doesn’t make sense. One year it was “It’s not Cinco de Mayo. This isn’t Mexico.” Another year he similarly noted that we don’t call Christmas the twenty-fifth of December or Veterans Day the eleventh of November. “So why are we doing it for Independence Day?” Also fair. And once he used some dry humor to note that July second—the day that colonies declared their freedom from Great Britain—is the proper anniversary for the nation’s independence, as if to say, “ ‘The Fourth’ is the wrong name for a celebration happening on the wrong date.”

If anniversaries are rich with insights about a people and a country, then milestone commemorations over time should tell us something about the nature of a nation.

The second is that Frederick Douglass will be invoked. All week long, my Black peoples will be sharing his famous speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” from 1852, when slavery was very much alive and well. About halfway through the address, he asked an exasperated rhetorical question of the white abolitionists: “What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence?” He called the United States hypocritical for championing liberty while pardoning the ownership of people and giving safe passage to the slave driver’s caravan. Douglass suggested Independence Day reminded the enslaved Black person of “the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity….”

Many Black folks feel Douglass’s words from more than 170 years ago deep in their bones today, reminded on the holiday that liberty is different for them. And yet, though it gets less attention than it should, Black critique of the United States is shot through with hope and optimism. Douglass, as usual, modeled it. His speech also extolled the virtues of the Declaration and stated his faith in the United States plainly: “I do not despair of this country.”

We do not either. We cannot. It is the only one we have.

When my white buddy’s Independence Day reminder is read alongside excerpts from Douglass’s speech, there’s a story in the distinction. Though we engage in the collective ritual—convening at pools and beaches and cookouts and nightcaps and fireworks—some are celebrating America and being American while others are staking an ownership claim and asserting their place in an America once denied to people like them. This matters because why we mark anniversaries is more meaningful than how, though the how gets all the attention. The country’s rituals and symbols become the focus of manufactured and politicized outrage about everything from flag lapel pins to national anthem etiquette, distracting us from the root problem. What does the day mean and who does it belong to?

When the different answers to what the Fourth means to me are considered, they gather into one of two camps. One leads with reckoning. The other with pride. We disagree on whether the nation is primarily something we should be proud of or the thing that must be contended with to achieve liberty. Understanding that difference helps us understand the United States’ central challenge: getting a diverse people to share both a national identity and aspirations for the future without muting their respective group history or culture.

This is why anniversaries matter. How we mark them and which ones we choose to commemorate tell us something about who we are, who we think we are, and who we hope to be. Celebration of a nation’s birthday is an important civic and social ritual. Societies need these to reaffirm a sense of identity and connection among its people. When people opt out of these rituals and celebrations, it is received as an explicit rejection of both the experience and the people participating in it. This is why how we mark the date is important—it is public, observable, and, therefore, social and political. And it is ripe for superficial conflicts masking that we’ve still not agreed on who are the us. Whether someone stands or kneels during the national anthem becomes more important than why. National rituals and symbols are hijacked and used to divide us.

If anniversaries are rich with insights about a people and a country, then milestone commemorations over time should tell us something about the nature of a nation. With four fifty-year anniversaries under our belt and the next one coming in just a couple years—the semiquincentennial, or 250th year of independence—there’s enough material to find a nation’s character. Grander sweeps of time provide perspective. Is there a bend toward justice or toward something else less laudable and poetic? Has the nation’s nature changed, or has it simply adjusted its membership requirements? We know the right answers to give, the ones that affirm our values are true and that we’re fulfilling our national destiny. But a more accurate diagnosis is found in the patterns that emerge over milestone national anniversaries.

So allons-y.

*

Of the four fifty-year anniversaries to date—1826, the semicentennial; 1876, the centennial; 1926, the sesquicentennial; and 1976, the bicentennial—only the last occurred after the end of slavery and Jim Crow. What must it be like to watch a nation celebrate freedom and independence while you are bound at the wrists and ankles or pushed to back seats and broken water fountains? What story does a nation tell itself that makes this hypocrisy acceptable?

The country is always grappling with what it’s supposed to take pride in. With what it’s done that requires reckoning. With what it aspires to be and for whom.

Who does America think it is?

When reading all the ways different people have marked the nation’s benchmark anniversaries, I find that three themes burst through: pride, reckoning, and aspiration. Pride comes across as a nation that’s proud of overcoming all of history’s hardships. It is proud of where it has been even when it isn’t proud of what it has done. For all the nation’s missteps, pride believes the United States is ultimately a cause to be celebrated.

When reckoning appears, the original sin is never far behind. It is the nation’s defining paradox, asking how a nation founded on the idea of equality continued enslaving people. Even on other issues, like discrimination on the basis of sex, gender, and sexual orientation or class conflicts between the rich and working class, failures on racial equality are the reference point that advocates for gender equality and a fair economy appeal to. How can the country make its past wrongs right? Or, others might say, we should acknowledge that it has already done so—and now too much is being asked.

Aspiration dreams of a nation where its people feel like they belong, where there is a shared vision for what the nation will be. It is a promise to posterity: we will leave this place better than we found it. And it is an ode to the past, telling its stories in the hopes that we don’t have to learn things the hard way, again. It aspires to exceptionalism, but a tolerant and humble version that makes room for others and leads by example.

Pride. Reckoning. Aspiration. The country is always grappling with what it’s supposed to take pride in. With what it’s done that requires reckoning. With what it aspires to be and for whom. The answers to these questions are found in the moods and rhetoric at anniversaries. They are where the soul of a nation shows itself.

__________________________________

Excerpted from If We Are Brave: Essays from Black Americana by Theodore Johnson. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Amistad Press, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyrighted © 2024 by Theodore Johnson.