Happy July 4th!
Enjoy family and friends today.
As it always should have been.
As always, we present this classic:
What is the 4th of July to the American Negro?
From The NYT:
5 Words That Changed America
Jamelle Bouie
There is a moment for every American when she first encounters the Declaration of Independence. For most, it comes to her as scripture — the highest and most sacred text in the nation’s civic religion, encapsulated by its moving assertion of human equality: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”This Declaration is a profound statement of values: of a universal aspiration for human freedom. As President Gerald Ford said in a speech marking the nation’s bicentennial, “The Declaration is the Polaris of our political order — the fixed star of freedom. It is impervious to change because it states moral truths that are eternal.”
As a matter of civic faith, this is what the Declaration means. As a matter of history, however, the story is much more complicated.
As Thomas Jefferson wrote it, the Declaration was less an affirmation of human equality than a pointed claim about the nature of political authority and a powerful assertion of the right of revolution, informed by the Enlightenment writings of John Locke and other social contract theorists. It was meant as an argument about the preconditions of government — an assertion of the purity of prelapsarian life — not a road map for emancipation.
“The opening assertions of ‘self-evident’ truths concern men in a ‘state of nature’ before government was established,” the historian Pauline Maier observed in “American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence.” “With regard to persons, equality meant simply that no one held authority over others by right of birth or as a gift of God.”
In other words, Jefferson was channeling a common sentiment in Revolutionary-era America, “a political orthodoxy whose basic principles colonists could pick up from sermons or newspapers or even schoolbooks without ever reading a systematic work of political theory,” Maier wrote. Just look to Thomas Paine, who wrote in “Common Sense” — published about six months before the signing of the Declaration — that “all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others forever.”Jefferson’s equality was a thought experiment. It did not extend to political society, nor was it meant for those placed beyond the political community. Men could be created equal and still be different; men could be created equal and still be subordinate.
This, for many of the Patriot leaders, was a given.
But then there were those outside the circle of belonging: women, Natives, landless laborers and, most starkly, Black Americans, both free and enslaved. They did not read — or, most likely, hear — the Declaration as an abstract claim about a prelapsarian past. They understood it as a radical statement of principle for the present. And they wielded this principle against a society that would not extend the Revolutionary promise of freedom and self-government to those held in bondage.It was their Declaration — the one that they made for themselves — that stood for a universal claim of human equality in the here and now. And it was their Declaration that would come to supplant Jefferson’s historical and metaphysical one as the linchpin of America’s civic ideal, passing from Black Americans to abolitionists to the Republican Party and Abraham Lincoln, who consecrated their Declaration at Gettysburg as the spiritual foundation for a “new birth of freedom” and a “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” established “four score and seven years ago” in 1776.
It is this Declaration that is under assault from a political movement that rejects the credal vision of the American Republic in favor of an exclusionary racial nationalism, that defines American citizenship by blood and heritage, that sneers at the “five words about equality” in the Declaration and that worships at the altar of hierarchy and caste. But it is also this Declaration that still inspires Americans to fight for their place in this country and demand their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It is hard to exaggerate the alacrity with which Black Americans seized on the rhetoric of the Revolution to demand a free and equal place in the new and nascent American Republic.
