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.
Trump Isn’t Embarrassing Himself. He’s Embarrassing America.
Every time I see a headline or a YouTube video that says, “Trump embarrasses himself by…” it irks me a little. Not because Trump doesn’t make a fool of himself — he always does — but because is it even possible for him to get embarrassed? Embarrassment requires self-awareness. It requires an understanding of social sta…
Beautiful and heartfelt article. The current leadership is trying hard to erase history. Thank you for reminding us of who we are. We are Americans. America is a mix of peoples with talents and interesting stories. But the mix is not important for we are all human beings. Now let's behave like it with humanity and caring and justice for all. Thank you, Edwin. Take care.
Unfortunately it is not just Donald Trump and his ethno-nationalist government that is the problem here. It is also the nearly half of American voters who returned to the presidency a man who had proven beyond any shadow of a doubt to utterly disdain and disavow our electoral process, our Constitution, and the rule of law. It is the Republican Senators who refused to honor the congressional oaths that ought to have induced them to convict Trump after January 6th, and all the Republican legislators who continue to support and enable him. It is the six members of the Supreme Court who gave him more power than the Framers ever intended. Without them, he would in all probability now be in jail. And all of them are also Americans.
The problem is that far from enough of We the People have ever sufficiently understood that we are both the inheritors of and the participants in the most extraordinary, the most crucial, the riskiest, and the most complex ongoing experiment in human society and government ever attempted, and thus bear the full and only responsibility for maintaining it.
Thus I view Donald Trump as a remarkable gift. He is, albeit unconsciously, ’the fire bell in the night’; the man who has shown us with a brutal clarity what our future holds if enough of us do not come to understand that experiment and the responsibility it puts on us.
I am just over 81, and so my life has almost exactly coincided with our descent from being the Arsenal of Democracy that with our allies defeated the greatest evil in human history to the political, financial, social, and religious morass in which we now find ourselves, ‘led’ by a president who clearly would have felt right at home in the heart of that evil.
I am often accused by Trumpists of ‘hating America’, seemingly unaware of the supreme irony of the fact that they have no concept of that experiment. In fact, as one who has worn her uniform and later taught her history for over 40 years, I remain fully in love with the idea of American Exceptionalism, while also understanding that it is a state we have yet to achieve. We are the ‘the last best hope of earth', the final promise of something better in world mired in autocracy for the entire five millennia of our historical past. But we had become complacent in the years following WWII, and Trump is the price we have paid for that complacency.
I fully agree with and share Mr Eisendrath’s dream. The November elections will start to prove if enough of us have understood Trump’s unintended lesson. But even if we win back the House and/or the Senate, that will, as Winston Churchill so clearly understood at his darkest moment, not only be the beginning of the end of Trumpism, but only the end of the beginning of our journey back.