Happy 4th, Y’all
How Frederick Douglass taught me to love the 4th of July even more
This is Dad//Citizen, a space where parenting and civicness come together. Where we try to make our communities a little bit better, every day.
Fourth of July to me means grilling, hanging out on a stoop or a front yard, flags, shooting off some illegal fireworks, and a chance to reflect on American history. The boys are too young this year to remember any of the activities, but they won’t be for long. And I can’t wait to celebrate with them.
Sparklers on our patio, watermelon seed spitting, chalk art, a Brooklyn block party, getting outside and being with friends and neighbors. And if my wife is reading this one, I promise we’ll be careful with the fireworks :)
And somewhere in that day I’m envisioning, before the fireworks, I hope we also take a walk and talk about American history. Not just the Revolution, 1776, and some vague conception of “American Exceptionalism,” but the reasons underpinning our country’s founding, the contradictions of the founders, and the work every generation has had to do since 1776 to close the gap between what we promised and what we practiced. My hope is that by the time they're old enough to ask hard questions, they already know asking them is what the day is for.
I hope at some point, they’ll ask what we’re actually celebrating.
I think that straightforward question has two answers: an easy answer and a harder one. The easy answer is independence, 1776, the birth of the country. The harder answer is the one Frederick Douglass gave in 1852, and it’s the one I want them to know way sooner than I did.
It wasn’t until my early twenties that I was introduced to the iconic speech Frederick Douglass gave on July 5th, 1852, to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. They apparently asked Douglass to speak at their Fourth of July celebration and he delivered what became known as “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
I wish I had read this speech when I was younger. It so perfectly captures the duality of the United States, the promise and the pitfall. Douglass didn’t entirely reject the founding or the founders. He praised the courage of the revolutionaries and the promises written into the Declaration of Independence. His point was sharper than rejection: the nation was celebrating freedom while three million people remained enslaved, and asking him to join the celebration meant asking him to pretend that contradiction didn’t exist.
As I understand it, what makes the speech timeless isn’t that it was angry. It’s that it was precise, and prescient. For the nearly 232 years leading up to this speech, American slavery had only grown, denying millions their freedom, their families, their labor, and their claim to the ideals in the founding documents. Roughly 13 years after this speech, it was formally abolished. One can also easily imagine a similar speech landing just as powerfully today regarding the two million people currently incarcerated.
What I love about this speech is that Douglass didn’t mince words: to the enslaved, he argued the day exposed the injustice and cruelty they lived with every day of the year, not just on the holiday. Douglass, a man who was born into slavery, could hold two extremely complicated concepts at once: real love for the ideals in the founding documents, and a clear-eyed refusal to pretend the country was living up to them.
To me , holding that combination of love and honesty at the same time is a harder needle to thread than pure celebration or pure cynicism. But a much more powerful message, ultimately.
Douglass could have chosen a quieter moment to raise the country’s original sin, but he didn’t. I think he chose the 4th, the loudest, proudest day for Americans on the calendar, to voice his truth: he saw ideals set forth through the nation’s founding documents as among the loftiest in human history, but they meant nothing to the people for whom those same ideals were just words on a piece of paper. It was the actions of the country which displayed the chasm between ideals and execution.
I think his speech reads less like bitterness and more like someone who thought the country was worth the confrontation. He held a belief that an entire nation was able to change.
That's the part of the speech that resonates with me most. I think what I share with Douglass, across all the distance of time and circumstance, is a sense that this country has incredible flaws and is still worth constantly challenging. I find his duality so important and resonant. Precisely because we're capable of living up to our truest aspirations is the reason why we must confront those inherent contradictions now.
I didn’t read this speech until after college. And as I think about it now, my sense is that learning about it earlier in my life would have dramatically changed my life. For the better.
Most of my core memories of the Fourth are exactly what you’d expect. Public pools, block parties in Atlanta, making dumb decisions with fireworks, my parents’ friends over for a cookout in the kind of Georgia heat that doesn’t break until well after dark.
Douglass’s speech doesn’t erase or obscure any of that. It actually make me want to recreate those exact same feelings with my family today, embracing Douglass’s duality. As I see it, my love for this country got more honest, not less, once I let that shadow in.
I grew up watching my parents treat civic life as something you participated in, not something you performed. To me, being civic means learning the full story, not the shorthand version. I want the same for our sons.
The boys are too young for the speech itself. But the groundwork starts now, in small ways:
Answering their questions honestly, at whatever age they ask them, instead of reaching for the flattest version of the story.
Making sure the books on their shelf, or the news they read from time to time, don’t all tell a sanitized version of American history.
When they’re older, reading Douglass’s speech with them directly so they hear him make the argument in his own words.
Treating “this is complicated” as a normal thing to say to a kid, not something to avoid until they’re older.
I don’t want my sons to think the Fourth of July is only fireworks and flags. I don’t want them to think it’s only a day for guilt or embarrassment, either. I want them to inherit some of Douglass’s duality: love the ideals enough to be honest about how far we still have to go to meet them.
Showing up informed makes you a better citizen. Teaching your kids to show up informed does too. That’s most of what I’m trying to do here. I don’t know yet what duality my sons’ generation will face, but I want our boys to have Douglass’s example in their back pocket when they face it.
Someday, on that walk before the fireworks, I hope one of them asks me a question I don’t have a clean answer for. That’ll mean it’s working.
Happy 4th!
You can read the full speech here if you’d like:
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I love this sentence: “Showing up informed makes you a better citizen.” So true!