Why Celebrate the Fourth?

 This weekend, millions of Americans will enjoy the fireworks, but others will take a knee on Independence Day.  Why celebrate? 

In her Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project,  Nikole Hannah-Jones argued that the primary purpose of the American Revolution was to promote and preserve slavery.  But it’s important to get the history right. 

 In 1775, Virginia’s English Governor, Lord Dunmore, proclaimed that slaves who deserted their American masters would be welcomed into the British army as free citizens.  Multitudes did so, and soon Dunmore had a black regiment at his command to quell unrest in the colonies.  It was only then, Hannah-Jones’ argument goes, with the prospect of losing their enslaved property, that delegates in Philadelphia put their signatures to the parchment declaring independence from King George.

Yet the skirmishing began long before Dunmore’s provocation. Prior to that, there was the Tea Party.  There were Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill.  Because muskets were so inaccurate in those days, the Continentals were instructed “don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.”  In the melee at Bunker Hill, the redcoats were savaged.  Over a hundred of the American soldiers that day were of men of color 

You may have learned in high school that Harry Truman was the first President to integrate the armed forces.  Actually, George Washington was.  Over 5000 African Americans served in uniform during the Revolution.  Blacks were there at every major engagement.

They absorbed the ethos of their compatriots.   “Self-evident truths” became part of their moral vocabulary.  They came away with ideas that were even more explosive than their flintlocks.  Men of color who fought and prevailed against the mightiest empire on earth walked with a new confidence.  They weren’t full citizens yet, but they were warriors.  And having fought to create the new nation, they had a deeper investment in its founding ideals.  

America would never be the same.   In her book Standing in Their Own Light: African American Patriots in the American Revolution, scholar Judith Van Buskirk observes that before 1760, very few Americans questioned the institution of slavery.  It was a fact of life, like the weather.  But in the space of a generation, something happened. “By 1790,” she observes, “the northern states had put slavery on the road to extinction … Abolition societies and aid societies sprang up in the north and south.  What happened between 1765 and 1790?  The American Revolution.”  Slavery would never again go unchallenged. 

It would take generations to see the effects.  It would take the Civil War.  It would take mass movements, Montgomery and Selma and Black Lives to pass the torch forward.  The flame faltered at times.  It flickers now, as our nation faces white nationalists and resurgent hate.  But none of this should keep us from celebrating July Fourth.  For despite his recent coronation, Charles is not our king.  Our nation is founded on principles quite different from those of the hereditary right of some to rule over others.  A nation that still clings to the ideals of freedom and equality.  

Those ideals are fragile, always in danger.  So protest if you like.  Practice your right of free speech and assembly.  Our nation began in protest and needs healthy dissent.

Because America’s is an unfinished revolution, a revolution in progress.  Learn your history and then earn your history.  Fly your flag right side up or upside down or not at all, but know why you do it. Educate yourself.  We have no need to renounce or censor our past, nor any need to romanticize or gloss over it either.  For all its imperfections, it’s a heritage worth remembering.