I am referring, of course, to Frederick Douglass. Because one could substitute the word “Black” for “Slave” in “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” – the famous speech he delivered on July 5, 1852, and it would still resonate.
Douglass decried the myriad ways America’s treatment of black folks made a mockery of its Declaration of Independence and founding documents.
This is just one of the many reasons why, with all due respect to its Founding Fathers (and MLK), I think Frederick Douglass is the greatest American ever. I delineated those reasons, comprehensively and quite persuasively – even if I do say so myself, in the related podcast linked to below.
Legacy of racism
But, if Douglass is too serious for you, perhaps the Langston Hughes poem, “Let America Be America Again,” will do. It was published in July 1936 and includes these equally resonant (parenthetical) lines:
(America never was America to me)…
(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this ‘homeland of the free.’)
That, alas is how much the legacy of racism, America’s “original” crime against humanity, affects black folks in America even to this day.
And nowhere is this more eerily so than in the way the Roberts Supreme Court is rolling back civil rights. Because Douglass himself could decry this Court with many of the same constitutional arguments he used to decry the hypocrisy inherent in rulings the Taney Supreme Court handed down to deny civil rights to blacks, especially during the 1850s.
If gas is so high, why are so many people driving?
But, on a much lighter note, July 4th is replete with many less serious contradictions. And none is more nationally expressed and experienced than the one playing out on highways across America today.
Because, to hear all the reports about record traffic congestion, you’d never know that gas prices have never been higher; or, more to the point, that Americans have never been more outraged by them.
And still they drive…
Related commentaries:
Douglass Podcast… America was never America…