Democracy is under organized siege by MAGA and their elected autocratic governance officials, so commemoration of the country’s 250th anniversary must be tempered by the realities of a failing democracy, and the country must set a new course by defiant and committed Black women and men activists organizers who have advanced, and who continue to advance, democracy and justice.
The country fought a Civil War over our social and economic existence. We advanced our fate and the nation’s democracy governance principles in Black Reconstruction 1860–1880, making touted principles, values, and promises of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution living, although fragile, realities for all.
Those democracy-precedents, especially the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, for all U.S citizens, including immigrants, an inspiration to global liberatory movements, are now under withering attack, being brazenly dismantled by the U.S. government elected and supported by one-third of co-citizens under the MAGA banner.
The MAGA local, state, congressional, judicial, and presidential project backed by millions of voters, and led by the would-be dictator — megalomaniacal autocrat president Donald Trump, is rapidly dismantling (per campaign promise) the foundations of liberal capitalist democracy — diversity, inclusion, and equity — that socially and legally excluded Africans and their descendants from enjoying full liberties as co-human beings and citizens from the founding of the Republic.
MAGA is an open call and in-progress implementation to legally reinstitute white supremacy governance, undergirded by an absolutist-Eurocentric cultural and fundamentalist Christian religious worldview, to erase the victories and contributions of the Black Freedom struggle.
Let there be no misinterpretation, no wobbling, about current U.S. MAGA national and global-alliance governance policies against rights and liberties of people of color and Global South sovereignty.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated the alarming case succinctly in Munich, Germany, in February: “For the United States and Europe, we belong together. America was founded 250 years ago, but the roots began here on this continent long before … carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new.”
European founding fathers of the United States, yes, but not my African-descended mothers and fathers, cast in law and custom as chattel.
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We live in an urgent moment that requires recall that African Americans have a rich history and arsenal from which to draw to demand, organize, and successfully defend and advance democratization of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution to fulfill the authoritative pronouncement: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men {People} 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.”
On this 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence, the historical voice of Frederick Douglass echoes. A former slave, who in 1852 — 76 years after the Declaration of Independence and 65 years after adoption of the U.S. Constitution — asked, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Another 174 years later, Black Americans, indigenous peoples, liberal white women and men, other non-European citizens and immigrants, LGBTQ, pro-working class progressives, and Trump-maligned “shithole countries” must restate Douglass’s pragmatic interrogatory with equal urgency, courage, and clarity, asking: “What to national democracy and global freedom is the semiquincentennial?”
Today, we must reject false praise, not fall into the “this is not America or American” diversions from what is actually happening, nor heed conventional calls for restoration of abstract democracy, nor succumb to pieties of “America is better than this.”
We must not partner in narrow, self-interested domestic defense postures, proposed by many liberal centrists and moderate Democratic and Republican Party leaders (Black leaders among them) who turn a blind eye, or worse, are complicit in U.S. government economic, genocidal, and military regime change policies around the world (Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran) in our names, for national defense.
On this 250th commemoration of U.S. independence, hear and boldly act on the declaration of citizen poet Langston Hughes in 1935:
“O, yes,
“I say it plain,
“America never was America to me,
“And yet I swear this oath —
“America will be!”
James Counts Early is former Smithsonian Institution assistant secretary and director of cultural heritage policy at the Institute of the Black World 21st Century-Pan African Unity Dialogue.
