Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr,. always asked us to recount the Janus-faced truth of American history – the brilliant ideas and the egalitarian vision; and the pathologies of inequality, racism and exploitation – as a intertwined dialectic that remains unresolved. This dialectic that always leads us to confront the question he used as the title of his final book: Where do we go from here, chaos or community? In turn, the answer to this question depends on our courageous action.
I have learned all this from Dr. Clarence B. Jones, who has been a blessing to this nation, and to me.
Declaration and Revolution
The process of declaration includes the following steps: attentive witness; honest recognition of the truth of personal and collective experience; courage to speak that truth, without diminishment or obfuscation; documentation of the truth in a public statement that includes a detailed accounting of the facts and a reasoned explanation of the meaning of those facts, the consequences of their acknowledgment, and the actions that must be taken as a result.
Revolution cannot happen when people are asleep, or they cower under the authority of an oppressor, or they deny the reality of their oppression, or pretend that the harms incurred are less terrible than they know they are.
Declaration can be revolutionary, the first step in the process of revolution, when leaders representing the people publicly delineate the violations of rights that have accumulated, identify the grave human costs involved, and assign responsibility for these violations to the regime that caused them.
July 4, 1776
Yesterday on July 4 we remembered the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. In signing and publishing this document, the founders of our nation affirmed the radical, self-evident truths that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Following a comprehensive accounting of the “long train of abuses and usurpations” inflicted upon the people of the colonies by a despotic, tyrannical King and his government, and an affirmation of unity in severing allegiance to the British Crown, the founders proclaimed the political identity of all colonies as “Free and Independent States” now, immediately, as a result of the declaration’s signing and publication.
250 years
Next year, on July 4, 2026, we will celebrate the Semiquincentennial of the United States – our nation’s 250th anniversary. Congress has established a commission America250 to “spearhead” the Semiquincentennial celebration by organizing “festivities and events across the nation” during the months leading to the July 4, 2026 celebration. According to the commission’s website, “The journey toward this historic milestone is an opportunity to pause and reflect on our nation’s past.”
We do not need to wait for any official events to reflect on the meaning of our history across these 250 years. We can tell the truth of what has come before and what is happening in front of our eyes today, the ongoing dramatic narrative in which we are both witnesses and, at least potentially, actors.
The narrative of American history is the ceaseless struggle between leaders, movements and forces mobilizing power to implement the commitment to equality embedded in the Declaration of Independence – to realize what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described at the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom as the “promissory note to which every American was to fall heir” – and opposing leaders and forces mobilizing power to suppress and eviscerate the Declaration’s commitment to equality, to shred the promissory note Dr. King held up before the nation as our rightful inheritance.
Prominent examples of the mobilization of power to realize the Declaration’s promise of equality includes the American Revolution, the framing of the Constitution as the will of We the People: the Underground Railroad and the Abolitionist movement; the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln, including the Emancipation Proclamation and the defeat of the Confederate Army; the ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments; the Freedmen’s Bureau and the short lived experiment in Black Reconstruction; the New Deal and the Great Society; and what Rev. James Lawson calls “the nonviolent movement of America,” including the Black Freedom movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the labor and women’s movements, the movement against the war in Vietnam, the movement for economic justice, encapsulated in the 1966 “Freedom Budget for All, the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968 and the Poor People’s Campaign of 2024-today the movement for environmental sustainability, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the nascent “No Kings” movement of the present hour.
Prominent examples of the mobilization of power to eviscerate the Declaration’s promise of equality includes the institution of chattel slavery, and all of the rotten compromises that were enacted to maintain it, including the 3/5ths clause of the Constitution, multiple versions of Fugitive Slave legislation and the bounty system that fueled kidnapping across state lines, and the founding of new slave states pursuant to Manifest Destiny; mass destruction, expulsion and genocide of native peoples and nations; the declaration of the Confederacy; the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877, removing federal troops from the former Confederate States; the rise of the KKK terror and the establishment of Jim Crow apartheid; and the slow evisceration of the New Deal and Great Society, culminating in the enactment of Donald Trump’s so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill” which Trump signed yesterday in a White House ceremony celebrating July 4 – legislation implementing a massive transfer of resources from the poorest and most vulnerable people in our society to the wealthiest and most powerful; financing a system of concentration camps to imprison undocumented persons arrested by ICE who do not choose to “self-deport” and who, Trump and his allies have suggested, will be subject to forced labor; and eliminating all commitments that the U.S. government had made to invest in clean energy and the reduction of carbon and methane emissions to mitigate catastrophic climate change.
This struggle is the fundamental dialectic of the American narrative. Donald Trump represents a return to history, not a culmination. The struggle will continue. It will never be resolved unless we capitulate.
July 5, 1852.
July 5 is an important day in our country too. Today on July 5 we hear the voice of Frederick Douglass, who with immense courage and integrity dedicated his life to the realization of the promise of equality embedded in the Declaration of Independence.
On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass asked America to honestly confront the chasm between the core founding principles upon which the United States was founded and a barbaric system of extreme inequality that defined its sociological reality, a system that enslaved millions of African Americans as chattel under barbaric conditions of unceasing violence.
Douglass delivered his remarks (“The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro”) at Corinthian Hall, Rochester, New York, to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society.
“This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the Fourth of July. It is the birth day of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance… (italics added).”
While dissociating himself and his people from this celebration, Douglass made clear that he had no animosity for the Founding Fathers. On the contrary, he began his speech by lauding their courage and vision.
“Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, too-great enough to give frame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.
They loved their country better than their own private interests; and, though this is not the highest form of human excellence, all will concede that it is a rare virtue, and that when it is exhibited it ought to command respect…Your fathers staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, on the cause of their country. In their admiration of liberty, they lost sight of all other interests.
They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men; but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance; but that they knew its limits. They believed in order; but not in the order of tyranny. With them, nothing was “settIed” that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were “final”; not slavery and oppression.”
Here Douglass frames his praise in historical terms, in contrast to conditions and political leaders in the present that represent the opposite of everything they stood for.
“You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation. Their solid manhood stands out the more as we contrast it with these degenerate times. How circumspect, exact and proportionate were all their movements! How unlike the politicians of an hour!”
It is this contrast, between vision and reality, between past and present, between white Americans and Black Americans, that Douglass came to highlight.
“My business, if I have any here to-day, is with the present. The accepted time with God and His cause is the ever-living now.
I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common.
The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!
[For the American slave, July 4] is a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, 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—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.
There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour. Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the every day practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival…”
Douglass concluded his speech with faith that the Declaration’s promise of equality will be vindicated.
I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably, work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope.
Where do we find hope today?
The National Museum of African American History and Culture helped to facilitate the production of a short video in which Frederick Douglass’s descendants gathered to read from his iconic July 4, 1852 Rochester speech. I encourage everyone to watch this moving, and inspiring video, which you can find here.
We find hope in the knowledge that Frederick Douglass was right — the institution of chattel slavery was ended in this country.
It is an immense tragedy that the end of slavery foreshadowed by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did not become fully realized until Union victory following the bloodbath of Civil War.
It is also a tragedy that the 13th Amendment abolishing chattel slavery in the United States was drafted to permit slavery “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,” an exception that has enabled the scourge of forced labor to continue in prisons and detention facilities throughout our country. This loophole is especially shameful and terrifying at this moment when a system of concentration camps are envisioned for undocumented persons under the new masssively militarized ICE regime.
The America250 commission offers no hope for us. The official “festivities and events across the nation” it plans to offer us a sham, the sounds of rejoicing it promises are empty and heartless; the shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; the prayers and hymns, sermons and parades only a thin veil to cover up crimes committed by President Donald Trump and the sycophants and scoundrels who surrounded him and kiss his ring.
Even though this commission is officially “bipartisan,” it has already been hijacked by the Trump Administration to generate propaganda for the regime’s “long train of abuses and usurpations,” beginning with Trump’s militarist spectacle of June 15, 2025, which the America250 Commission lauds as “U.S. Army Grand Military Parade”. (“On June 14th, the nation came together in Washington, D.C. for a powerful display of patriotism and pride… President Donald J. Trump led the festivities, participating in a momentous tribute to those who have defended the nation across generations…. We want to provide a special thanks to our amazing group of all-American sponsors, Oracle, Lockheed Martin, UFC, Coinbase, Palantir, Amazon, Exiger, and ScottsMiracle-Gro…. The 250th Anniversary Grand Military Parade was more than a historic milestone—it was a proud affirmation of the Army’s role in shaping America’s past, securing its present, and inspiring its future.”
This is all a lie. Trump’s pathetic parade was, in the words of a true patriot, Frederick Douglas, “mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy.”
But June 15, 2025 was a historic day. Because on that day somewhere around millions of people gathered in peaceful protest against the inhumanity, cruelty, graft, corruption and encroaching despotism of the Trump Administration in peaceful rallies in cities and towns throughout the country. According to Axios,
As of midnight on Sunday, June 15, we have data from about 40% of No Kings Day events held yesterday, accounting for over 2.6m attendees. According to our back-of-the-envelope math, that puts total attendance somewhere in the 4-6 million people range. That means roughly 1.2-1.8% of the U.S. population attended a No Kings Day event somewhere in the country yesterday.
June 15 was probably the largest nonviolent mass protest in the 249 year history of the United States. And there will be much larger ones before we reach the July 4, 2026 Semiquincentennial celebration.
According to the distinguished nonviolence scholars Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, who conducted a comprehensive review of the literature on civil resistance and social movements from 1900 to 2006, “Overall, nonviolent campaigns were twice as likely to succeed as violent campaigns: they led to political change 53% of the time compared to 26% for the violent protests. Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.”
Where do we go from here? We need to grow our movement from roughly 1.5% of the US population to 3.5% on a sustained basis. Can we do this? Of course we can.
A New Declaration of Independence from Tyranny
“In conclusion, I share below a “A New Declaration of Independence from Tyranny” published by Andy Borowitz yesterday, July 4, 2025, and effective immediately.
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to break from a leader who governs with cruelty, contempt, and corruption, a decent respect to the opinions of humankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all people are created equal, endowed with inherent dignity and unalienable rights—among these are life, liberty, equality, and the pursuit of justice.
That to secure these rights, governments derive their power from the consent of the governed. When a leader becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right and duty of the people to refuse allegiance and to stand united in the defense of their freedoms.
The current holder of high office has shown himself to be unfit to lead a free and just society.
* He disrespects women, mocking survivors of violence and stripping away their rights.
* He fuels racism and white supremacy, scapegoating communities of color and denying their equality.
* He assaults free speech, attacking the press, punishing dissent, and spreading disinformation.
* He exploits public office for private gain, enriching himself and the billionaire class while abandoning the poor and working people.
* He undermines justice, ignores the rule of law, and places himself above accountability.
* He disregards science, endangering lives in times of crisis and sacrificing the planet for profit.
* He fans division and incites violence to maintain power, wielding fear as a weapon against the people.
Time and again, we have protested peacefully, spoken truthfully, and appealed to our shared humanity. We have been met with indifference, hostility, and violence. A leader who governs through hatred and greed is unfit to govern at all.
Therefore, we, the people of conscience and conviction, do solemnly declare our independence from this tyrant and all he represents.
We withdraw our consent.
We refuse to be complicit in cruelty.
We reject the abuse of power for personal gain.
We stand for dignity, truth, equality, and justice for all people.
With firm reliance on each other and unwavering hope in our collective strength,
We pledge to resist oppression in all its forms,
To uphold the rights of the vulnerable,
And to build a future grounded in compassion, courage, and shared humanity.
Let this declaration be both a breaking and a beginning.”
Where do we go from here?
We need Frederick Douglass, and each other, more than ever.
Jonathan D. Greenberg
