African American Policy ForumVarmennettu tili

"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?"

"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 

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.

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.

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.

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