July 4th and American Memory
July 4th will once again find Americans enjoying parades, picnics, and fireworks to celebrate our founding. But the founding story leaves out important history. Not everyone had their “unalienable rights” in 1776. Nor has everyone gained them yet.
In 1852, Frederick Douglass was asked to speak to the Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society of Rochester about the meaning of Independence Day. He refused to speak on July 4th, and so his July 5th oration included this reminder:
“This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”
It would take eleven more years for the Emancipation Proclamation and thirteen for the 13th Amendment to extend legal liberty to African Americans.
On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr, the great-grandson of a slave, stood at Lincoln’s Memorial reminding us that “One hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.” Nearly six decades since, freedom for many black Americans is still, as Langston Hughes wrote, a “Dream Deferred.” Liberty from legal discrimination and freedom to live without the shackles of prejudice, poverty, educational and psychological barriers are not the same thing. This is no less true for Native Americans, whose near extermination our historical memory mostly ignores.
The promise of the Declaration will stay unmet as long as we avoid a robust historical and moral reckoning. Civil rights laws, the removal of Confederate statues, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice honoring victims of lynching, local museums like the Emmet Till Historic Intrepid Center and the efforts of universities to recognize their use of enslaved labor are welcome parts of that work. Yet the resurgence of white nationalism, the insistence by many that racism no longer exists and the willingness of some to find “good people” among the purveyors of racist hatred confirm that we remain a nation divided about our past and its impact on today. We still lack a national consensus on the cause of the Civil War (slavery or states’ rights), what schools should teach our children about slavery and Native Americans and the effects of and actions required to end racism.
Philosopher Susan Neiman’s 2019 book Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil challenges us to grapple with this. Quoting William Faulkner - “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” - she reminds us that efforts to bury the past are morally wrong, poison the present and prevent a better future. “Working through the past,” Vergangenheitsbewältigung, is the German effort to reckon with Nazi evils. After World War II, many Germans initially saw themselves as the war’s worst victims and the Nuremburg Trials as “victor’s justice.” It took decades of demands from civil society for German leadership to respond.
That response is vigorous and continues. There are no statues for Nazi perpetrators, but there are many honoring their victims. A massive monument to murdered Jews stands near Berlin’s Brandenburg gate. Others exist for those slaughtered because they were disabled or gay and one is planned to remember Nazi victims throughout Europe. Germany’s “culture of remembrance” includes “stumble stones,” small brass plaques inserted into sidewalks and roads, each with a victim’s name and dates of birth and deportation. Beneath a glass covering in Berlin’s Bebelplatz is a memorial of stacks of empty bookshelves commemorating the burning of over 20,000 books on May 10, 1933.
Every schoolchild reads When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, a Holocaust survivor’s novel based on her family’s 1930’s escape, a flight which meant leaving a child’s pink rabbit behind. In 2015, as refugees flowed out of Eastern Europe and across the Mediterranean, Germany opened its doors. Many Germans held welcome signs on train platforms. Some took refugees into their homes. The contrast to cattle cars that carried so many to their deaths during the Nazi terror was stark and intended.
Neiman acknowledges that Germany’s “working through the past” is incomplete. Racial intolerance, for example, has resurfaced among the far-right, spurred by hatred of immigrants. The German approach is not a model but testimony to the importance and possibilities of “working through the past.” If America ever hopes to heal its racial divisions, that work is essential. It has only just begun.
The goal is not blaming Americans for the sins of ancestors. Nor is it identity politics or political correctness, though all these charges are made against doing this work. It is an effort to base our future on fact. As Nelson Mandela challenged South Africans, without truth there can be no reconciliation. Until we work through our past we cannot educate our children whose task it will be to build a more inclusive and moral society.
It is also an effort to express shame that an America founded on human dignity engaged in racist evils. As Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural, the Civil War was about “American slavery.” Slavery in the South could not have lasted 250 years without help from the North. Without a national sense of shame, what prevents future acts of racist hatred?
The declaration of Juneteenth as a national holiday is a welcoming step, yet its celebration of freedom awaits a much fuller reckoning with slavery and its impact on all of us today. That reckoning will be hard and will take national political leadership, which is still missing. Yet for July 4th to achieve its full meaning, we must live James Baldwin’s words, which Neiman quotes: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Photo Credit: German “stumble stones” - Deventer Sluisstraat - The_Netherlands
