America’s 250th birthday party is well underway. There was a UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House. There will be a naval armada in New York Harbor — tall ships, gray-hull military vessels — passing in presidential review past the Statue of Liberty. There will be concerts, but only certain artists need apply — most of those originally booked have already walked out, saying they were misled about the event’s political affiliations. There will be fireworks, parades and a great deal of speechifying about American greatness.
What there will not be — if those stage-managing this celebration have their way — is an honest accounting of the history being celebrated. The names and stories that don’t fit the mythology are already being quietly erased: from curricula, monuments, museum exhibits and the memory that a nation owes its people.
Abolitionist Frederick Douglass would recognize every bit of this Fourth of July.
In 1852, while standing before an audience in Rochester, New York, after being invited to toast the birthday of American democracy, Douglass offered instead a reckoning: “What, to the American Slave, is your Fourth of July?” He looked at the bombast of national celebration and named it with the precision of a prophet: “Your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy.”
The pageantry was real. The liberty it celebrated was not — not for everyone. Consider the enslaved people for whom none of those freedoms existed.
Douglass was not asking America to abandon its ideals. He was demanding that it stop wearing those ideals like a costume while committing crimes against its own people.
After 250 years, the costume is back on.
In our eyes, this national moment is a test of spiritual honesty. America was birthed in genocide and built by slavery, and it has continuously recommitted itself to the project of white supremacy. To enter this anniversary uncritically — wrapped in flags and the mythology of manifest destiny — is to be bamboozled. The cruelest dimension of this is that a Christianity hijacked by the evangelical right now seeks to sanctify that mythology in the name of God.
When religion is made to serve the work of empire rather than the work of liberation, something has gone grievously wrong. The cross was not meant to be a stage prop for strongmen.
In 2026, too many are still waiting. Douglass made his argument when the nation was 76 years old. Now, at 250, we have had time enough to know what the Fourth feels like to those still unprotected by its promises. It’s the crack of a cell door replacing the crack of a whip. It’s another name added to a memorial wall in a city that cannot seem to stop burying its children.
What is the Fourth of July to the mother whose 1-year-old son did not survive a traffic stop? To the neighbor detained without warning? To the community whose history has been scrubbed from public view even as the nation throws itself a party in the name of freedom? Consider the removal of exhibit panels on slavery from Independence Hall itself, the very building where the Declaration of Independence was signed. We do not celebrate 250 years of enslavement, mass incarceration, voter suppression and white terror.
We call this anniversary what it is: a moment of mourning and of reckoning. And, if we are willing, of possibility.
For all the searing force of his indictment, Douglass did not abandon hope. He knew what his audience needed to understand: that America was young and that youth contains the capacity to become something greater.
“The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times,” he told the crowd. “But his heart may well beat lighter at the thought that America is young, and that she is still in the impressible stage of her existence.”
At 250, America is no longer young. The question Douglass posed — whether this nation would choose the full truth of its past over a curated myth designed not to offend — is more urgent, not less. We are being asked to choose between two versions of ourselves. One version sings hymns to a mythic nation always free, always just, always brave, always chosen. The other version dares to face what the great civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois called the yet-to-be United States of America: to reckon with the full weight of sorrow and failed promise alongside what we might yet become.
This second version is harder. It requires what Douglass called the work of the reformer: the willingness to lay another brick in the unfinished cathedral of multiracial democracy, if we are willing to build it with honesty instead of spectacle.
This Fourth of July, the pageant will be loud. The fireworks will be spectacular. And Douglass will be watching, waiting to see whether, at long last, we are ready to mean what we say.
“God speed the year of jubilee,” he wrote, speaking of the biblical promise of redemption and freedom for all, “the wide world o’er.” May we be the generation that stops waiting for jubilee. May we begin, with head and heart and hand, to build it.
Chicago faith leaders Rabbi Seth Limmer, the Rev. Otis Moss III, the Rev. Ciera Bates-Chamberlain and the Rev. Michael Pfleger joined the Tribune’s opinion section in summer 2022 for a series of columns on potential solutions to Chicago’s chronic gun violence problem. The column continues on an occasional basis.
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