What is the 4th of July to descendants of the enslaved?
The Hobbs Sunday Sermon
Today's headline is the Hobbservation Point's homage to what is arguably abolitionist Frederick Douglass's most famous oratory, “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?” Douglass delivered this speech in July of 1852, not long after a second Fugitive Slave Act had been signed to allow slave catchers to profit from snatching up escaped and free Blacks, alike, to sell into bondage in the South during the run up to a bloody Civil War that would begin in 1861.
But for us living in America 245 years after independence was declared in 1776 (and only weeks after a Juneteenth Federal Holiday was signed into law by President Joe Biden to commemorate the end of slavery in 1865), we now find ourselves in the midst of the latest offensive in the so-called “Culture War,” this one launched by conservatives aiming to white-wash history in public schools.
Truth be told, American history has always been white-washed with half-truths and whole lies that seeks to revel in the nation's glory without much mention of the gory horrors inflicted by the white majority upon Blacks, Natives, and Asians in furtherance of white supremacy across the Western Hemisphere. Perhaps no clearer example of this truth is Thomas Jefferson's formal Declaration of Independence, written a quarter century before his presidency began, one that is considered by historians to be among the most revolutionary documents ever written. In some ways it was; in others, it set the blueprint for what would become government sponsored violence against people of color, the likes of which remain in some forms, like police brutality, to this very hour.
As Jefferson vouchsafed a list of grievances against Great Britain's King George III, deep down in the dicta, Jefferson, the same man who declared in the opening paragraphs that "all men are created equal," included the following passage: "King George III of Great Britain...has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."
Sigh…it is clear that “all” men were not created equal then, much like “all” lives do not matter, now!
Over the next 100 years, the likes of Jefferson, a slave owner who fathered children with his enslaved half-sister in law, Sally Hemings, would encourage the violent put down of "domestic insurrections" (read—slave rebellions), while fostering the killing of Native Americans, ones he called “merciless savages,” while fomenting their displacement from lands that their tribes had owned for millennia.
And to think that your history books, just like mine, called all of this white supremacist murder and mayhem against people of color "Manifest Destiny”—as if God Almighty had sanctioned the same in His divine will!
Thus, Ol’ Hobbs's unyielding push to compel public acknowledgment of REAL history in our schools and in the cyber public square. Real history, mind you, that moves beyond the feel good stories of jingoists who wish to maintain the centuries old racist status quo in America!
So, having commemorated Juneteenth last month, and Emancipation Day here in Florida on my birthday (May 20th), I will spend today remembering my ancestors in bondage who could only yearn for the day that “Massa” Jefferson's idealistic 1776 missive on independence would be extended to their own desires for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” To conclude, I leave you with a few of the aforementioned words of Frederick Douglass that eloquently captured the angst of the ancestors in bondage:
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? 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 boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.”
Lest we forget!
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Amen (and a little women)
Well-done, Nupe! On point!