The Fifth of July: Choosing Memory Over Celebration
Hope Infusion - July 5th Edition
I stopped celebrating the Fourth of July a few years ago, but this year, something shifted. As parody continues to calcify into policy and democracy dangles by a thread, I found myself not just uninterested, but utterly disconnected!
How can a nation profess freedom while purging its archives, banning Black history, and whitewashing the brutal truths of its origin story? What does independence mean when the stories of the people who built this country are erased in real time?
To stand in celebration amid that erasure feels like spiritual amnesia. And so, like Frederick Douglass, I mark the fifth instead.
The Fifth of July
Frederick Douglass famously refused to deliver his 1852 speech on the Fourth of July. He insisted it be given on July 5th instead, a deliberate act of resistance. He knew the hypocrisy of celebrating liberty in a land that still held his people in chains.
“What to the American Slave is your 4th of July?” he asked.
The answer then was as searing as it is now: A day that reveals, more than any other, the gross injustice and cruelty of this nation’s conscience.
Almost three decades earlier, in 1827, Black New Yorkers made a similar choice. Although slavery had officially ended on July 4th of that year, Black communities feared racial violence would taint any public celebration. So they organized a march on July 5th instead.
Four thousand people took to Broadway, led by an honor guard on horseback and a grand marshal bearing a drawn sword. They proceeded to the African Zion Church where abolitionist William Hamilton declared, “This day we stand redeemed from a bitter thralldom.”
They knew what we are now being asked to remember:
•Dates mean nothing without truth.
•Declarations mean nothing without justice.
•Fireworks mean nothing without freedom.
The House passed a bill this week that guts Medicaid, food assistance, and rural healthcare, all so billionaires can receive another windfall.
They timed it to land before the fireworks, as if legislative cruelty could be camouflaged by patriotic spectacle. This year, the stars and stripes waved above a battlefield of budget cuts and moral collapse. The date may honor freedom, but the policies betray it.
A democracy that must be begged to care for its people is not one worth celebrating. A democracy that silences its own past cannot be trusted with its future.
Parting Thoughts
2025 has been a recurrent reminder that freedom declared is NOT the same as freedom delivered.
This is not a moment for frivolous fanfare. It is a moment for, clarity, conscience, and remembrance. A moment for mourning the gap between promise and practice. A moment for standing in the lineage of truth-tellers like Frederick Douglass, who refused to dress injustice in red, white, and blue.
So no, I didn’t celebrate the 4th with fireworks, but I will honor the 5th with memory and with reverence for all those who never tasted the freedom they were told to celebrate. I honor those who mourned the hypocrisy of false independence while daring to live free anyway.
There is power in choosing which stories we enshrine. There is agency in remembering what we were never meant to forget. There is defiance in the decision to still bear witness, wide-eyed, unblinking, and with a vow to continue holding this nation accountable to the radical proposition that began it all: That no one is born better than another.
May we live like we believe it!
In His Own Words
What follows is a direct excerpt from the text of Frederick Douglass’s speech as delivered on July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York. These words, spoken more than 170 years ago, remain astoundingly resonant today. I honor him here in his own voice, unfiltered, uncompromising, and undeniably prophetic.
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. . . .
I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism a sham, your humanity a base pretense, and your Christianity a lie.
It destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a bye-word to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union.
It fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement, the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet, you cling to it, as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes. Oh! Be warned! Be warned!
A horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation’s bosom; the venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away, and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions crush and destroy it forever!
Spot on!