Legal Commentary

When I was in college, the only colonial thoughts I had on July 4th involved Sam Adams. Later, I began to focus on what we're celebrating, our independence from the British Crown, the birth of our nation, a reason for all of us to be proud. However, now that I teach Race and the Law, I often find myself recalling that when I was a kid in South Carolina, my own family also celebrated Juneteenth, the holiday many African Americans associate with the Emancipation Proclamation. I also think about Frederick Douglass, who rose from slavery to become a public intellectual and leading abolitionist, and his 1852 speech at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York. In the full speech Douglass expressed his admiration for the founding fathers and the principles of the Declaration of Independence, but also offered an indictment. It is the following passage that is most often quoted. Douglass asked:

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.

Five years later, Douglass would offer a devastating critique of Dred Scott, but live to see the end of slavery and the passage of the Civil War Amendments. I can't help but wonder if he ever addressed the meaning of the 4th of July again. What I do know is that when I think of Douglass's July 4th speech, I'm awed by his own brand of patriotism which allowed him to at once celebrate the words in the Declaration of Independence and "the great principles it contains," critique the country's failure to put those words into practice, and imagine the America that could be.

Now, we can all celebrate the 4th.