Tomorrow, the United States turns 250 years old. The official celebrations have been in production for years. There will be flyovers and legacy specials and a semiquincentennial logo stamped on everything that will hold ink. What there will not be, anywhere in the program, is an honest accounting.
In 1852, Frederick Douglass stood before the citizens of Rochester and asked the question this country has been dodging ever since: what, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? Every generation of Black people has had to answer it again in their own time.
Six years ago, in the summer the whole world rose up, it was our turn. On July 4, 2020, hundreds gathered in Westport for an Anti-Independence Day Rally outside Kelly’s Westport Inn, one of the oldest buildings in Kansas City and one that held Black people enslaved in its basement. A carriage burned in the street where enslavers once did business. And I stood up and asked Douglass’s question for our time.
We are printing that speech again today, lightly condensed for your inbox, because on the eve of 250 it reads less like a memory and more like a warning that kept its word.
FROM THE SPEECH · WESTPORT, JULY 4, 2020
To Black so-called African Americans, Indigenous people, Latinx people, folks from all the countries of Asia and all the countries of Africa: what, to the world, is the 4th of July?
My Indigenous siblings would tell us that this country wasn’t founded on forced removal, it was founded on genocide!
My Black people would say that this country was not founded on our backs or our fronts. We built it, but it was founded on white supremacist terrorism!
And there is no such thing as Black liberation without talking about Palestinian liberation. Free my Palestinian siblings. None of us are free until all of us are!
We have a lot of learning to do, and even more unlearning. We have a lot of mythical, indoctrinating history, written by the oppressor from a white supremacist, Eurocentric perspective, that we need to unlearn.
At some point in the last century, the elite, the wealthy and powerful, spent a lot of money, manipulated a lot of history books, and made it a point to propagandize the masses into a rigid, fundamentalist belief in nonviolence as the only morally proper tactic to achieve social change. Take just half a second to think about who benefits from the masses being docile. I don’t even have to answer the question.
You mean to tell me that America, America of all countries, is telling us that we should be nonviolent?
The same America that legalized the lynchings of Black people and promoted them as if they were family picnics?
The same America that still keeps a federal holiday for Christopher Columbus, a genocidal, murderous monster?
The same America that is the only country on earth to have ever deployed nuclear weapons on living populations, killing tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children?
The same America that ripped millions of my ancestors off the shores of Africa and stuffed them onto ships so tightly packed that a vast majority died in transit?
The same America that weaponized the FBI against Black freedom fighters in the civil rights movement and literally authorized government-sanctioned assassinations and bombings of the homes of civil rights leaders?
The same America that gave birth to mass incarceration as the capitalist evolution of the chattel slave industry?
You see, I’m a thinking person. I don’t take America’s promises and rhetoric at face value. I look at her actions and her policies. And her actions and her policies tell us, this very holiday tells us, that America only believes, respects, and responds to organized action, economic action, organized rebellion.
Indeed, the American Revolution itself was a liberation movement that started with riots and looting, what we today call the Boston Tea Party, and it ended in bloodshed. It was not peaceful. It was not even close to peaceful. It was not marching and singing, it was bayonets and swinging! It was give me liberty or give me death!
The 4th of July is a self-inflicted indictment of the most brutal, terroristic colonial empire the world has ever been witness to. A day of reckoning, of star spangled banners and Wall Street scammers. The chest-rumbling boom of an M80 less representative of freedom than it is reminiscent of the dynamite that pillaged and ransacked Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The 4th of July in 1776 gave birth to the world’s most powerful, destructive capitalist imperial regime in the history of the human species.
“But the people still exist, and the people still resist.”
I need y’all to say: we must resist. We must resist. We must resist. The power is not with the institutions or the mayors or the city council members. The power is with the people. Power to the people. Power to the people. Power to the people.
And still, we gather.
Now let me tell you the other truth, family. Tomorrow, all across Kansas City, Black folks will pull grills into driveways and parks the way we have every summer of our lives. There will be ribs coming off the smoke that went on at midnight tonight. There will be a spades table where somebody gets roasted so bad they have to laugh too. There will be little cousins running through sprinklers, uncles arguing over the playlist, and somebody setting off fireworks in the middle of the street long past the point anybody asked them to.
And very little of it will have anything to do with patriotism. Most of us are out there because the day off is ours now, because the sun is out and the family is together, because Black joy has always been its own declaration of independence. Douglass asked what the Fourth of July means to us, and for 174 years our people have been answering with our feet and our seasoning. We will take the day, and we will make it ours.
Both of these things are true at once. The indictment and the cookout. The receipts and the ribs. We hold them together the way a people who turned a mourning song into gospel have always known how to hold grief and glory on the same plate.
So however you spend tomorrow, spend it with your people. Be loud with love, loose with joy, free in every direction.
