For Many Black Americans, July 4 Marks 250 Years of Struggle, Not Celebration

By Stacy M. Brown

Senior Global Correspondent

This article appears in the Washington Informer

When the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, celebrations will stretch from Philadelphia, where organizers plan to bury a time capsule for future generations, to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and thousands of communities participating in festivals, concerts, exhibits, and block parties.

The official message from organizers is one of unity and national pride. But for many Black Americans, the anniversary has become something else entirely. Rather than celebrating 250 years of freedom, they are asking whether the nation has fully delivered on promises made in 1776 while millions of Africans remained enslaved and generations of their descendants continued to fight for rights guaranteed to others.

Civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton said the nation’s birthday is not necessarily a Black celebration.

“They’re going to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the country July 4th, but that’s not our celebration,” Sharpton said. “We were slaves then, and they celebrate signing the Declaration of Independence in 1776. We were not even emancipated until 1863. So, I don’t know what everybody is getting ready for a celebration [for]. You know that it seems crazy for me to have on the birthday hat at your birthday party. That ain’t my party. When White kids hear us talking about reparations or affirmative action, they think it’s an attack because they don’t know what their granddaddy did to us.”

The anniversary is being coordinated through America250, the bipartisan congressional commission established to oversee nationwide commemorations, and Freedom 250, a White House task force created to promote federal observances. Organizers describe the effort as an opportunity to celebrate the nation’s history, achievements, and future.

At the same time, Black organizations are advancing a different conversation.

Black Lives Matter has launched a campaign called “250 Years of Resistance,” arguing that Black Americans have spent nearly every year since the nation’s founding battling slavery, racial violence, segregation, disenfranchisement, mass incarceration, and economic inequality. The organization has called on supporters to use the anniversary not simply as a celebration of independence but as a reminder that the fight for freedom remains unfinished.

That view has gained traction among historians and civil rights advocates who point to ongoing disputes over voting rights, the teaching of Black history, diversity initiatives, and economic disparities.

Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, said the nation’s anniversary presents an opportunity to confront history rather than avoid it.

“We need a Secretary of Reconciliation just as we have a Secretary of Education, a Secretary of Labor. We need a Secretary of Reconciliation who would report directly to a president, not this president, directly to a president. And the job would be to reconcile our differences,” Green said.

He added, “And that reconciliation, for me, I say this with no shame, no embarrassment. I am unapologetically Black, and I say this: that would include reparations. Reparations for the 240 years of free labor that people still benefit today from and that we were locked out of opportunities along the way while they were benefiting.”

Questions about who gets to define America’s story at 250 have become increasingly prominent. Historians, educators, and community leaders have warned that attempts to restrict discussions about race, slavery, and discrimination risk creating a version of history that celebrates triumphs while minimizing the experiences of those who were excluded from them.

Rev. Peter Johnson, who worked with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and grew up in Plaquemine, La., alongside civil rights leader Andrew Young, said the nation’s anniversary should include both celebration and honesty.

“Two hundred and fifty years is a long time for a nation. It is long enough to celebrate achievements. It is also long enough to tell the truth,” Johnson said.

“For Black Americans, patriotism has always been complicated. Our ancestors helped build this nation while being denied its promises. They planted crops they did not own. They built wealth they could not keep. They fought in wars for freedoms they themselves did not enjoy.”

Johnson said he worries about efforts to diminish both history and democratic participation.

“I worry when I hear language that divides Americans against one another. I worry when voting rights are treated as political inconveniences instead of sacred democratic responsibilities. I worry when history itself becomes something people want to sanitize, edit, or erase.”

Those concerns surfaced during a recent national discussion on WHUR’s “The Daily Drum,” where scholars examined what America’s 250th anniversary means to Black communities.

Political analyst Dr. Avis Jones-DeWeaver said she sees troubling similarities between current political battles and conditions Black Americans faced generations ago.

“I am feeling like, as we get towards this commemoration, that ironically, as African Americans, we are at a space in which everything possible is being done to try to put us back into the same political box that we were in 250 years ago,” Jones-DeWeaver said. “We have a history of overcoming, and we have to dig back into that spirit in order to overcome again.”

Dr. Kaye Whitehead, president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, challenged the foundation of the celebration itself.

“This idea of celebrating the 250th birthday celebration of America starts with the fact that it’s rooted in a lie,” Whitehead said. “What was happening to Black folks in 1776? We were enslaved in this country.”

Whitehead said current battles over history are inseparable from broader fights over citizenship and political power.

“You can’t tell American history without telling Black history,” she said.

Howard University professor Dr. Greg Carr argued that Black Americans should view the anniversary through a global historical lens rather than a narrowly patriotic one.

“I have no commitment to the United States of America,” Carr said. “I think my question for any African person that does is, why do you?”

Referencing Frederick Douglass’s famous critique of Independence Day celebrations during slavery, Carr added, “What to the slave is the 4th of July? What to the captive and the trafficked is a semi-quincentennial of a criminal enterprise.”

Howard University political scientist Dr. Marcus Board said Black Americans continue to face attacks on their political power, identity, and historical understanding.

“I would say that I’m in a rage most of the time, whether it’s 250, 249, 48, 47, and onward,” Board said.

Board said Black progress has always depended on collective action rather than waiting for acceptance.

“Our overcoming isn’t contingent on whether or not America exists,” he said. “We can exist in a free state, liberated, revolutionary, all the while these things are happening.”

As fireworks, parades, concerts, and commemorative events prepare to celebrate America’s first 250 years, many Black Americans say the milestone should not be measured solely by the passage of time. They argue that anniversaries matter less than whether the nation is willing to confront the truths that shaped it.

“We are the generation watching us lose ground,” Whitehead said. “We’ll have nothing to leave our children if we don’t stop the burning at this moment.”