Commentary: This Fourth of July Is Yours, Not Mine

173 years after Frederick Douglass exposed the hypocrisy of America celebrating freedom on its blood-drenched soil, the holiday still rings hollow for too many of us.

Kenneth B. Morris, Jr.

Every year, Americans celebrate the Fourth of July with fireworks, parades, and patriotic songs. Flags are waved. Grills are fired up. Faux patriots drape themselves in red, white, and blue. A familiar narrative is put on proud display, a tale of freedom hard-won, of a nation born in rebellion and defined by liberty.

For many Black Americans, the Fourth of July doesn’t feel like a celebration. It feels like a line drawn in the sand between those who have always been welcomed into the American story and those still fighting to be seen. It’s a reminder that the freedom being celebrated was never meant for all of us.

And when we name that truth, when we demand a nation that lives up to its stated ideals, we’re not celebrated for our patriotism. We’re condemned for daring to claim a stake.

But behind the celebration is a darker truth, one soaked in the blood of contradiction. For millions, Independence Day does not mark freedom realized, but freedom denied. It reminds us that the liberty being celebrated was written by men who cracked whips with one hand and signed declarations with the other. The holiday may belong to the nation, but not to all who built it.

Next week, I’ll be on the third leg of four Footsteps to Freedom Underground Railroad study tours we lead each summer for educators. These participants include teachers, administrators, superintendents, parents, and others who work with young people in educational spaces, those responsible for shaping how students understand our shared American history and prepare for the future.

Together, we retrace the routes once traveled by freedom seekers who fled enslavement in search of something America declared but never fully delivered: liberty. These educators traverse sacred ground, not just to understand and grapple with the past, but to prepare themselves to teach a more honest and inclusive version of it to the next generation.

As part of the footsteps tour, I stand before the Frederick Douglass statue in Rochester, New York, and deliver an excerpt of the very speech my great-great-great-grandfather gave nearby at Corinthian Hall on July 5, 1852. I speak his words aloud, not just to honor him, but to remind us all that the questions he asked still demand answers.

The Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society invited Frederick Douglass to give a celebratory Independence Day speech to an audience of approximately six hundred allies and supporters of the abolition cause. It’s recognized today as one of the greatest speeches in American history. He began by paying respect. He praised the revolutionary spirit of 1776, referring to the Founders as “brave men” and “wise men.” He honored their courage. He recognized their bold vision.

My ancestor never denied the power of America’s founding ideals. But admiration without accountability is sentiment, not justice. Calling a nation to live up to its promises is not unpatriotic; it’s the deepest form of allegiance.

Then came the fire. With unflinching moral clarity, my great ancestor condemned the hypocrisy of a nation that celebrated freedom while keeping millions in bondage. He exposed the institutions—religious, legal, and political—that upheld that system. Then came the reckoning:

Your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; 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. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

It can be argued that America is still guilty of practices that would disgrace any nation that dares to call itself free.

Oration, Delivered in Corinthian Hall, Rochester, by Frederick Douglass, July 5th, 1852 (Library of Congress).

Those words weren’t hurled at strangers or enemies. They were aimed at those who considered themselves friends. However, my forebear knew his message wouldn’t end in Corinthian Hall. He intended to reach a wider audience by publishing the speech. He was speaking from within the house, raising his voice not to burn it down, but to force it to see itself.

And that’s where I stand today, within the house. As an American. As someone who believes deeply in this nation’s potential and knows just how far we are from fulfilling it.

And like my ancestor before me, I now speak to the nation not as an outsider, but from within, with love, with urgency, and with truth.

It’s 2025—a new year, but the same contradictions.

You still claim freedom while silencing those who tell the truth about how it was denied. You still declare equality, even as the very protections meant to ensure it are dismantled. The past is honored in name, yet the parts that could redeem this country are erased in practice.

Across the country, the effort to suppress truth is growing. Teachers are told to avoid uncomfortable facts. Books are pulled from classrooms. Legislatures pass laws that make it risky, even punishable, to speak honestly about this nation’s past.

Founders are praised, but rarely challenged. Slavery is acknowledged, but its brutality is softened or ignored. And while many educators continue to fight for a complete story, in too many places, the celebration of freedom still depends on silence about those it was never meant to include.

And what is more shameful than that, than teaching young people to be proud of a country they don’t fully understand?

In Florida, students are being taught that “slaves developed skills” that could be used for “personal benefit.” In Texas, textbooks sanitize history by calling slavery “involuntary relocation.” In Edmond Public Schools, Oklahoma, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was removed from class reading lists in 2021, not because it lacked literary merit, but because it was deemed too “ideologically charged.”

Works like Beloved, The 1619 Project, and other consequential books by authors of color, LGBTQ+ writers, and other marginalized voices are being challenged or removed from schools and libraries. At the same time, books that center white historical perspectives continue to dominate curricula with far less scrutiny. Educators are told that words like “diversity” and “white privilege” are too controversial to include, while foundational texts by authors of color are treated as ideological threats.

This is not education. It is censorship masquerading as tradition, and a betrayal of the ideals the Founders professed.

My ancestor understood that loving a country means holding a mirror up to it. Silence in the face of injustice isn’t loyalty. It’s complicity.

This is why many Black Americans don’t fully embrace the Fourth of July. It’s not because we don’t love this country. It’s because we love it enough to expect more from it. Because we remember that beneath the founding ideals was a foundation of bondage.

And yet, we do not turn away. We walk. We teach. We challenge. We show up.

The educators on our Footsteps to Freedom tour are doing what Frederick Douglass did on that summer day in 1852: speaking hard truths in rooms that aren’t always ready to hear them. They are patriotic in the truest sense, not because they stay silent, but because they demand a country worthy of the next generation.

Calling on America to become what it claims to be is not a rejection of the country; it is an act of faith in it.

That faith is under attack. In a nation where politicians invoke Frederick Douglass’s name while rejecting everything he stood for, the very people who claim to protect liberty are often the ones working hardest to control the narrative.

That control is dangerous. The moment a country begins to fear its reflection, it starts to forget who it truly is. And once it forgets that, it can justify anything. Even cruelty. Even injustice. Even forgetting the people who helped build the country in the first place.

Frederick Douglass didn’t reject the Declaration of Independence. He believed in its principles. But he refused to let the country hide behind them while violating their meaning.

When he ended his Fourth of July oration, it was not with despair, but with urgency. The nation, he said, was still young, having only been around for 76 years, and had time to change course.

My great ancestor left the stage with hope. Not a passive hope, but one forged in fire, a belief that this nation could still become what it claimed to be.

I hold that same hope.

But hope isn’t a performance. It’s not fireworks and flag-waving. It’s not a holiday.

Hope is the work.

I stand where my ancestors stood. I walk where they walked. And I move forward with purpose.

I believe in the power of truth, of memory, and of generations who won’t stop until this nation becomes what it claims to be.

Until that day arrives, this Fourth of July is yours, not mine.

In Freedom,

Ken

Explore the full text of Frederick Douglass’s 1852 Fourth of July speech.

This post was originally published on this site