NEW YORK - 1 July 2004 / www.MaximsNews.com / -- In a few days America will turn again to its most treasured moment of spiritual refreshment—the celebration of the Fourth of July, literally the birth-day of the United States.

For many the forthcoming celebrations will be tinged with a special poignancy, shadowed as our lives are now by the loss of the lives of Americans and others abroad who’ve fallen to the war against terrorism.  

Perhaps that will spur more of us to spend a few moments more contemplating what freedom means and what its purchase has cost.

That the Declaration of Independence was signed July 4, 1776 may be sufficient to make the month the one most historically resonant of all for us Americans.  

But I’ve been reminded that July is also a month full of powerful historical anniversaries of African Americans’ long march to freedom as well.

For example, this July 2 we mark the fortieth anniversary of the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the most sweeping civil rights legislation enacted by Congress since the Reconstruction Era a century before.

In the famous photographs of President Lyndon Baines Johnson signing the Act in the East Room of the White House one can almost feel the sense of the history of the occasion pervading the room. 

[In fact, July 2 is also the day the Continental Congress actually approved the resolution which led to the writing of the Declaration.]  

And then, in a photo taken moments later, we scan the smiling faces of those present as the President distributes the signing pens to the Senators and Representatives who shepherded the legislation through the Congress, and to one other man, an outsider to the fraternity of politicians present. 

That man was the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.—the chief spokesman of the Civil Rights Movement, and the principal representative of the people whose struggle and sacrifice and indomitable will had brought that moment into being.  

On another July day sixteen years earlier, another President, Harry S. Truman, had affixed his name to another important marker on the long road to Negro Freedom.  

On July 26, 1948 Truman signed Executive Order 9981, which ended the longstanding racist practices against African-American soldiers, fliers and sailors that had disgraced the American military right until the end of World War Two.

Truman was responding not only to the moral imperative of history.  

He was also responding to the momentous new determination that coursed through Black America in the wake of the Second World War.

Powered by the decades-long Black Migrations out of the South to the urban North and West, which had given them a measure of freedom and opportunity, and by their contributions to the American effort to “make the world safe for democracy,” African Americans well understood they had once more proved their fitness for citizenship; and this time they would take their share of it.        

So, in the immediate aftermath of the war would come welling up from ordinary black people in ordinary black communities in South Carolina, Delaware, and Kansas, the challenges to official school segregation at the local level that led to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v Board of Education.

And a year after that landmark decision came the first flashpoint of the modern civil rights movement, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, whose leaders drafted as its chief spokesman a newly-minted minister who had just arrived in town:  Martin Luther King, Jr.

But July’s specific importance to African-American history goes back even farther, back at least to July 5, 1852.  

For on that day Frederick Douglass, who had been born into slavery and escaped his bondage to become the most famous crusader for the rights of African Americans of his day, spoke before the Rochester (New York) Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society.

Douglass’ speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” was both a paean to the ideals set forth in the Declaration and the Constitution, and a scathing indictment of White America’s failure to extend them across the color line. 

Speaking at a time when Slavery itself, let alone the fiercest kind of racial discrimination seemed a permanent fixture of American society, Douglass thundered, “Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present … America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.”

One hundred and twelve Julys would pass before it could be said that those words were no longer true.

I make no brief for displacing America’s official Black History Month—February:  chosen in 1926 by the African-American Scholar Carter G. Woodson because it was the birth-month of both Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (and, in fact, several other racially-significant events).

Indeed, July’s importance to African-American history underscores the fullness of the history of African Americans in and of itself, and also how profoundly intertwined it is with the forces and ideals which led to and flowed from the actions of the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776.    

 

 

To register for the National Urban League Conference in Detroit, July 21 -25, call toll-free 1-800-263-9926, or register online at www.nul.org. 

And don’t forget to do your duty in this important Election Year:  register to vote, and vote!

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