This week is one of national celebration, cookouts, American flags flapping in the wind, fireworks, and family vacations – all in recognition of the bold act patriots took to declare America’s independence in 1776. Yet, even as we mark 248 years of freedom from the British crown, we have made no such declaration of independence from a sinister and enduring influence on our nation: the confederacy. In this regard, America is not truly independent.
It is fashionable around Independence Day to cite Frederick Douglass’s most famous speech, delivered on July 5, 1852, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” His reflections on the resounding shouts of liberty when paired with the “doleful wail of fettered humanity, on the way to the slave markets” were astute, prophetic, and lacerating. Digging deeper into the Douglass archives, one will also find his repeated and searing indictments of the confederacy, its racist ideology, and romantic clinging to the so-called lost cause.
I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery; between those who fought to save the Republic and those who fought to destroy it. – Douglass, 1894
By design, the Confederate States of America never envisioned a pluralistic nation where thriving, whole, and healthy Black people coexisted with their white neighbors. The confederacy was white supremacist ideology and racially oppressive practices and policies, legitimized through a confederate government, confederate currency, and a confederate flag. Read what they wrote, recount what they did, and remember what they stood for. It does not take much imagination to conjure up the chilling vision of what this nation would be today had the confederates won the Civil War.
But they didn’t win. (At least not on paper.) And the post-bellum period presented a rare opportunity to build a new, pluralistic, and whole American democracy and society. Those following years witnessed formerly enslaved and subjugated Black Americans realizing unprecedented constitutional, electoral, and political gains. Black people helped create multi-racial electoral majorities in Southern states, served in elected office at all levels, and played pivotal roles in state governments that introduced sweeping reforms to education, transportation, and other sectors.
We want a country which shall not brand the Declaration of Independence as a lie[;] … a country in which the obligations of patriotism shall not conflict with fidelity to justice and liberty[; and,] … a country … in which no man shall be fined for reading a book, or imprisoned for selling a book[.] … If accomplished, our glory as a nation will be complete, our peace will flow like a river, and our foundation will be the everlasting rocks. -Douglass, 1864
But this progress threatened the dignity and superiority of former confederates, who then unleashed a ferocious wave of terror, murder, segregation, and retrenchment. The confederacy still had life in its limbs – and a racist ideology on its mind. To the current reality that, 159 years after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, the confederacy is alive, well, and resurgent in this nation. America is not truly independent.
To this point, a Virginia school board earlier this year renamed schools after confederate generals Turner Ashby, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee. The last time America saw a surge in naming schools after confederates was 70 years ago, right after the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. The Virginia governor then vetoed the legislature’s act to strip tax-exempt status from the United Daughters of the Confederacy – an organization that to this day commits to “protecting, preserving and marking the places made historic by [c]onfederate valor.” America is not truly independent.
Is it not about time that this bombastic laudation of the rebel chief should cease? We can scarcely take up a newspaper . . . that is not filled with nauseating flatteries of the late Robert E. Lee. – Douglass, 1870
As a Virginia resident, this neo-confederate affection is infuriating. As a father, it is frightening. And as a Black man in America, it is disappointing, yet not surprising. My family and I encounter prominent altars to the confederate cause everywhere we go in the state. Whether going to church, grocery shopping, the movies, or even to the doctor, we will undoubtedly pass by, drive on, or walk into some memorial to celebrated figures who would have deemed this very LinkedIn post criminal because it’s proof that I can read and write – a flagrant violation of confederate law.
What does it say about the nation that, according to Monument Lab, in 2021 there were more public monuments to Stonewall Jackson than to Alexander Hamilton; more to confederate president Jefferson Davis than to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt; more to Robert E. Lee than to Dwight Eisenhower, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman combined? It says that America is not truly independent.
A 2022 Public Religion Research Institute/E Pluribus Unum survey found:
- Fifty percent of Americans consider the confederate flag to be a symbol of Southern pride;
- Sixty-four percent feel the same about monuments to confederate soldiers;
- Sixty-four percent similarly see streets, schools, and public parks named after confederates as a source of pride; and,
- Sixty percent of Americans support holidays such as confederate memorial day and Robert E. Lee’s birthday.
The nation’s elementary school crush on the confederacy would be embarrassingly pathetic and pitiable (“bless America’s heart”), were these monuments not actual shrines of terror with direct links to the health and wellbeing of Black people in the past and present. University of Virginia researchers linked an increased number of confederate monuments in counties with increased numbers of lynching victims. University of Connecticut researchers noted the negative effect that the nearby presence of confederate monuments can have on Black women and their mental health, even today.
The message is clear: the lost cause never lost. The confederate combatants never departed the battlefield. And America never truly declared its independence – from confederate romanticism, confederate ideology, and even the confederate flag.
Well, the nation may forget; it may shut its eyes to the past and frown upon any who may do otherwise, but the colored people of this country are bound to keep fresh a memory of the past till justice shall be done them in the present. – Douglass, 1888
During a week filled with backyard grilling and flamboyant displays of patriotism, we must remember the confederates whose ideological heirs remain on the battlefield. They continue to wave their banner high because they recognize the abiding infatuation that remains for the confederacy. Their cause will persist, and their ideology will flourish until we finally and fully declare our independence from the confederacy’s legacy of racism.
This independence must start with the truth. The truth is that we can build a future where all of us can thrive and live fully and freely. The truth is that lost cause romanticism is a structural barrier to health for all that we must deconstruct and delegitimize together. Finally, the truth is that doing so is required to form a more perfect union, to truly be the land of the free and the home of the brave, and to have liberty and justice for all.
From Douglass’s day to today, these truths have long been self-evident. We just need the courage to declare them.
We are sometimes asked, in the name of patriotism, to forget the merits of this fearful struggle, and to remember with equal admiration those who struck at the nation’s life and those who struck to save it, those who fought for slavery and those who fought for liberty and justice. If we ought to forget a war which has filled our land with widows and orphans; […] which has piled up a debt heavier than a mountain of gold, swept uncounted thousands of men into bloody graves and planted agony at a million hearthstones — I say, if this war is to be forgotten, I ask, in the name of all things sacred, what shall men remember? – Douglass, 1871
This post was originally published here.
