Independence Day?

"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 sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, 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..."
                                                                                       -Frederick Douglass

Recently in class, I asked my students when they thought the United States began to truly live out the principle of "All Men Are Created Equal".  The Theoretical Nation vs. Real Nation question.

Was it...
July 4, 1776: The Declaration of Independence
April 12, 1861: Ft. Sumter
January 1, 1863: The Emancipation Proclamation
April 9, 1865: Appomattox
February 3, 1870: 15th Amendment Ratified
May 17, 1954: Brown v. Board of Education
Sept. 24, 1957: Federal Troops "Occupy" Little Rock
July 2, 1964: The Civil Rights Act
???????????: ????????????

Maybe a couple of questions will help you determine what our "Independence Day" should be...

What determines freedom in America today?

Citizenship...Land Ownership...Voting...Employment...High Quality Education...

Are we free?

Racial Profiling...Police Brutality...Stop and Frisk..."Low Expectation" Schools...Massive Government Programs...Anti-Immigrant Hatred...

My vote for "Independence Day"...November 11, 1918.  Yes, this is Armistice Day...the day we celebrate the end of WWI..."The War To End All Wars!"  It is also our modern day Veterans Day...I suggest it is the perfect day to celebrate veterans, freedom,  and annually declare war on racism in America! 

W.E.B. DuBois' "Returning Soldier" Essay

 

But today we return! We return from the slavery of uniform which the world's madness demanded us to don to the freedom of civil garb. We stand again to look America squarely in the face and call a spade a spade. We sing: This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land.
It lynches.
And lynching is barbarism of a degree of contemptible nastiness unparalleled in human history. Yet for fifty years we have lynched two Negroes a week, and we have kept this up right through the war.
It disfranchises its own citizens.
Disfranchisement (denying the vote) is the deliberate theft and robbery of the only protection of poor against rich and black against white. The land that disfranchises its citizens and calls itself a democracy lies and knows it lies.
It encourages ignorance.
It has never really tried to educate the Negro. A dominant minority does not want Negroes educated. It wants servants, dogs, whores and monkeys. And when this land allows a reactionary group by its stolen political power to force as many black folk into these categories as it possibly can, it cries in contemptible hypocrisy: "They threaten us with degeneracy; they cannot be educated.
It steals from us.
It organizes industry to cheat us. It cheats us out of our land; it cheats us out of our labor. It confiscates our savings. It reduces our wages. It raises our rent. It steals our profit. It taxes us without representation. It keeps us consistently and universally poor, and then feeds us on charity and derides our poverty.
It insults us.
It has organized a nation-wide and latterly a world-wide propaganda of deliberate and continuous insult and defamation of black blood wherever found. It decrees that it shall not be possible in travel nor residence, work nor play, education nor instruction for a black man to exist without tacit or open acknowledgment of his inferiority to the dirtiest white dog. And it looks upon any attempt to question or even discuss this dogma as arrogance, unwarranted assumption and treason.This is the country to which we Soldiers of Democracy return. This is the fatherland for which we fought! But it is our fatherland. It was right for us to fight. The faults of our country are our faults. Under similar circumstances, we would fight again. But by the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that that war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.
We return.
We return from fighting.
We return fighting.
Make way for Democracy!
We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.