What We Actually Celebrate on July 4th (and What Trump Can't Take Away)

No matter what Donald Trump and his ethno-nationalist government attempt to do, the enduring heritage of American freedom will take them down.

Here’s what makes America exceptional: While others might fall to a would-be dictator who gains control of their government, we will not. What we celebrate on July Fourth is not the declaration that all are created equal, but the years of struggle since then that taught us to believe it.

The long struggle for freedom and equality in America has many heroes. Back in 1921, poor white miners in West Virginia’s Logan County protested for safer working conditions and livable wages. The local government promptly jailed their police chief whose crime was sympathy for the workers. Ten thousand miners then marched towards the jail. President Warren Harding sent armed federal troops to stop them. In the battle that followed, 16 miners were killed many others were wounded. The strikers were forced to give up their weapons and go home. And yet … their battle inspired a movement that eventually prevailed.

Back in the 1780s, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John, and implored him not to forget the ladies as he joined efforts to draft our constitution. It would take another century-and-a-half and the sustained efforts of suffragettes before women would be allowed to vote.

But of all our struggles, the long, painful fight for freedom and equality for Black Americans is the one that most explains the American character, that speaks to the best in us, and every day reminds us of what we yet may aspire to be.

The first casualty of the revolutionary war was Black — Crispus Attucks was shot down by frightened British soldiers in what became known as the Boston Massacre. Outrage at that shooting helped push colonists to rebellion in the name of freedom.

But, for some among the founders, the freedom they sought was the freedom to hold other men in captivity. Our nation, a nation dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal, and chattel slavery - an institution that denies this claim — were born together. That they could not survive together was known even to the founders. Four score and seven years later, the nation was at war to decide which would endure.

When the Civil War ended, Americans elected Blacks to congress. But Jim Crow, the terror of armed vigilantes sometimes wearing white robes, and the economic oppression of sharecropping stood in the way.

From the Civil War to the passage and signing of the Voting Rights Act, Black Americans tirelessly reminded the nation what we stood for.

Frederick Douglass. George Washington Carver. Mary Church Terrell. Booker T Washington. W.E.B. Du Bois. Ida B. Wells. Langston Hughes. Zora Neale Hurston. A. Philip Randolph. Paul Robeson. Marion Anderson. Jackie Robinson. Dorothy Height. Vernon Johns. Martin Luther King jr. Rosa Parks. Fannie Lou Hamer.

We should never forget these names because during an entire century when America was happy to be done with legalized slavery but willing to continue the brutality, oppression, and inequality, these people taught us about our better selves.

The story of Black freedom is not just a history of overcoming oppression. It is also a record of contribution to America’s wealth, to our scientific leadership, to our artistic brilliance. So many overcame so much to deliver immense benefits to everyone else. And as this history unfolded, it informed our most profound understanding of who we are.

The struggle for Black equality in America was never just a fight for Black America; it was a fight for us all. It was Jacob wrestling with the angel to become what he should be.

I am a white Jewish American. But this is my history, too. It is all of our history. It is, no matter what Donald Trump and his ethno-nationalist government attempt to do, the unerasable heritage of American freedom.

Lots of nations began by breaking free of oppressive empires. Why are freedom and equality held more firmly in America than in all those colonies that won their independence in the last hundred years? It’s not because of a promise in our call for independence.

Paradoxically, we are more free because so many Americans were not free and yet believed in that promise of freedom, and for generations fought and died to make us believe it too. There has not been one day since our founding that some Americans have not fought to be treated as equals. Not one day where some Americans have failed to demand the freedom that was promised.

The long fight for civil rights did at least as much for the idea that all men are created equal as did the writing of that proposition in a political manifesto in 1776. Not the Civil War, but the epic struggle that followed finally wedded the idea of freedom to the idea of America.

That idea kindled the fires that led to women’s suffrage, to workers’ rights, to marriage equality. Fealty to it drove Americans into the streets in Chicago and in Minneapolis when ICE agents arrived armed and determined to take our neighbors and friends and to tell us we could do nothing about it.

I am a proud American because this is who we are. The Obama Presidential Center, which opened this week in Chicago, tells this story — the story of those who kept faith with the idea equality, and whose efforts over time forever forged the idea freedom into the very concept of America.

In this perilous moment, take heart. Remember who you are; who we are.

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