Every year, the celebration of Independence Day is filled with meat on the grill, gathering of friends/family and shooting fireworks but I will not join in the celebration. How can I celebrate liberty with bondage — economic bondage, educational bondage and political bondage all around me? Years ago, I read a speech by Fredrick Douglass that opened my eyes about the celebration taking place on the fourth of July . Born a slave, social reformer Frederick Douglass was asked to deliver an oration at an Independence Day gathering at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, N.Y., in 1852. "What, to the American slave," he asked the crowd, "is your Fourth 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. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour."
The 4th of July, Independence Day, celebrating America's freedom. But the question is have blacks ever really been free in America? On July 4,1776 blacks were still slaves being sold in auctions all over America. Now let's fast forward to a more modern time; the era right before the Civil Rights Movement. Blacks wete under another form of bondage; Jim Crow. Jim Crow laws came into effect with separate water fountains, schools, swimming pools, going in the back doors to movies and resturants. Just over 40 years ago, Jim Crow laws were in effect all over the South. Now it wasn't much better in the North. There was just as much racism in the North but it was without a Southern accent and Confederate flags. Today, there's the New Jim Crow. Instead of laws, policies, politicians and judges weild their authority to disenfranchise blacks in society. Discrimination exist in all walks of life: jobs, sports, housing, election, arrets, etc. We've been taught that America is the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave but nothing could be further from the truth. Looking at the events taking place in this country, it's hard to tell if it's 1963 or 2015. Almost every week, there's another story about a black life being taken by a police ofgicers. Black people are still getting murdered by avts of terror while at their place of worship and black churches are being burned down in record numbers but it's mot getting media attention. In Baltimore, there was a week of non-stop coverage after a CVS was burned in protest after several officers allegedly killed a man in police custody but the attack on black lives and black churches is not deemed newsworthy. Independence Day is a celebration that recognizes a time in history when whites received independence from England but when will blacks receive independence from White America?
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