It is a strange thing to grow up inside a myth, to be taught liberty in a land built on the bondage of your great-grandparents, and to recite words that were never meant for you. It's like getting a new paper cut every single day.
This is the architecture of American memory: a nation that celebrates freedom with fireworks, even as it curtails it with law. A country that sells equality as gospel while gutting the very institutions that protect it. This includes the Senate passing the bill that will cut Medicaid, SNAP, and housing assistance for millions. We are told we are citizens, and yet we are watched, profiled, walled out, and ruled over. Told we are free, and yet bound by zip code, by skin, by ancestry, by design.
We have been here before—249 times in fact.
When Frederick Douglass stood before a white audience in Rochester in 1852 and asked, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” it was not a rhetorical question. It was a reckoning. He saw clearly what many still struggle to name: that the Fourth, for some, was not a celebration of freedom, but rather a pageant of forgetting and an annual ritual of national amnesia. Douglass did not beg for inclusion in his remarks. He used the moment to expose the contradiction.
More than a century later, another great orator took the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church on the Fourth of July. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a sermon titled The American Dream on July 4, 1965. He began with hope. “America is essentially a dream,” King said, “a dream as yet unfulfilled”. A dream rooted in the “sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God.” But even as he named that dream, he diagnosed the nightmare: “America has been something of a schizophrenic personality… she has exalted herself high in the realm of brotherhood and yet she has trampled over so many with the iron feet of oppression.”
King’s Fourth of July did not focus on the triumph of fireworks, but rather on the labor of repair. “If America is to remain a first-class nation, she can no longer have second-class citizens.” That sentence, delivered in 1965, echoes with chilling clarity today, as citizenship itself, once the surest foundation of American belonging, is once again under attack.
And yet, despite the weight of myth and the cruelty of memory, we are still here. We are here as architects of a new promise. We gather to build the future with our own hands. To raise a different Fourth of July, one that demands we remember and engage our power of joy, love, forgiveness, and hope.
We remember that Douglass did not despair. He thundered. That King did not flee the dream. He labored to redeem it. And we, too, do not bow to the moment. We rise in it.
Because freedom is not a gift handed down, it is a fight we inherit and a future we forge. If the dream remains unfulfilled, then so does our power remain untapped.
Langston Hughes wrote: "I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother."
Let the fireworks crack the sky. We will crack the silence. Let them try to rewrite the laws. We will rewrite the legacy.
This, too, is America. Not just the nation that was. The nation we are still becoming. The nation that is wide enough for all our dreams
I, too, am America. And we are not done.