Some Fourth of July Black history: A thread.
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"What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" "What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?"
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"Fellow citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them." Full speech: https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/2945
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After the Civil War, many Black Americans used Independence Day as an opportunity to celebrate the freedom they had fought for and won. As a result, Black July 4 celebrations became a target for white supremacist violence. Here's one example from Vicksburg, MS in 1875.pic.twitter.com/bglmC4vKSk
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On July 8, 1876, a white militia led by future governor and U.S. Senator Ben Tillman massacred Black people in the town of Hamburg, South Carolina. The stated purpose for the massacre was white anger over a Black-led Fourth of July parade that had taken place in the city.
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The Hamburg Massacre was part of a campaign of violence and white supremacist terrorism in which over 100 Black South Carolinians were murdered. One goal of this racist campaign was to suppress Black political activity throughout the state.
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In Hamburg, more than two dozen Black residents were rounded up, and six of them were murdered. Tillman personally executed Simon Coker, who had been elected to South Carolina's state legislator. A statue of Tillman still sits in front of the South Carolina state house.
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In the decades following Reconstruction, white Southerners and political leaders made concerted efforts to suppress Black attempts to publicly celebrate the Fourth of July. Black Americans were forced to celebrate privately or in
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At the same time, Southern newspapers often ran racist columns mocking Black Americans for supposedly not understanding the meaning behind the holiday. Here's one particularly vile example from the Atlanta Constitution (a precursor to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) in 1901.pic.twitter.com/iN0qsR5yKY
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Criticisms of America's founding were, of course, not limited to the Fourth of July. In May 1987, as the country was preparing to celebrate the Constitution's bicentennial, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall delivered a speech highlighting the shortcomings of that document.
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In Justice Marshall's speech he noted that the government devised by the founders "was defective, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation" to be turned into the document it was in 1987.pic.twitter.com/bsnpk42DDN
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Marshall also cautioned against treating the Constitution as a product of its time, noting that "the effects of the Framers' compromise have remained for generations. They arose from the contradiction between guaranteeing liberty and justice to all, and denying both to Negroes."pic.twitter.com/K5ODSqyNrl
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Here is Justice Marshall's full speech concerning the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution and his unwillingness to participate in the festivities with "flag-waving fervor": https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2686&context=vlr …
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