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JULY 4TH IN THE FACE OF FASCISM  
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Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and Bishop William J. Barber, II
July 4, 2025
Our Moral Moment
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_ This 4th of July, may we all gather with Fannie Lou Hamer and the
moral fusion family closest to us – both the living and the dead –
to recommit ourselves to a government of the people, by the people,
and for the people. _

Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer, Civil Rights Movement and Wayside Theatre
photographs, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

 

On America’s 249th anniversary of declaring freedom from tyranny, a
would-be king will celebrate Independence Day by signing a budget bill
that Americans oppose 2 to 1
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This Big Ugly Bill that was passed by Republicans in Congress this
week will make the largest cuts to healthcare and nutrition assistance
in our nation’s history to pay for tax cuts for people who do not
need them and an assault on our communities by masked men who are
disappearing our neighbors to concentration camps. The dystopian scene
is enough to make any true believer in liberty and equality question
whether they can celebrate Independence Day at all. But it would be a
betrayal of our moral inheritance to not remember the true champions
of American freedom on this day. Indeed, to forget them would mean
losing the moral resources we need to revive American democracy.

As bad as things are, we cannot forget that others faced worse with
less resources than we have. We are not the first Americans to face a
power-drunk minority in public office, determined to hold onto power
at any cost. This was the everyday reality of Black Americans in the
Mississippi Delta for nearly a century after the Klan and white
conservatives carried out the Mississippi Plan in the 1870s, erasing
the gains of Reconstruction and enshrining white supremacy in law.

When Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer decided to join the freedom movement in
Sunflower County, Mississippi, she knew two things: the majority of
people in Sunflower County despised the policies of Senator James O.
Eastland _and_ Eastland’s party had the votes to get whatever they
wanted written into law. The day she dared attempt to register to
vote, Ms. Hamer lost her home. When she attended a training to learn
how to build a movement that could vote, she was thrown into the
Winona Jail and nearly beaten to death. Still, Ms. Hamer did not bow.

Instead, she leaned into the gospel blues tradition that had grown out
of the Delta, spreading the good news that God is on the side of those
who do not look away from this world’s troubles but trust that a
force more powerful than tyrants is on the side of the oppressed and
can make a way out of no way to redeem the soul of America. “This
little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine,” she sang, and a
generation of college student volunteers came to sing with her during
Freedom Summer. Their mission was to register voters and teach the
promises of democracy to Mississippi’s Black children in Freedom
Schools.

On July 4, 1964, Ms. Hamer hosted a picnic for Black and white
volunteers who’d dedicated their summer to nonviolently facing down
fascism on American soil. They celebrated the promise that all are
created equal even as they faced death for living as if it were true.
Those same young people who were at Hamer’s July 4th picnic went on
to launch the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and take their
challenge all the way to the Democratic National Convention in
Atlantic City that August. “I question America,” Ms. Hamer said in
her testimony that aired on the national news during coverage of the
convention. “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of
the brave where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks
because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as
decent human beings, in America?”

Hamer and the MFDP didn’t win the seats they demanded at the 1964
convention, but Atlantic City would be the last convention to seat an
all-white delegation from Mississippi. Just a year later, as part of
the War on Poverty, Congress passed the Medicare and Medicaid Act
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expanding access to healthcare to elderly and low-income Americans –
an expansion that Trump is rolling back half a century later in an
immoral betrayal of the very people he promised to champion in his
fake populist appeal to poor and working people.

There’s nothing un-American about questioning a fascism that defies
the will of the people to terrorize American communities and assert
total control. It has been the moral responsibility of moral leaders
from Frederick Douglass, who asked, “what to the slave is the
4th of July?” to those who are asking today how Americans are
supposed to celebrate when their elected leaders sell them out to
billionaires and send masked men to assault their communities. Ms.
Hamer is a vivid reminder of the moral wisdom that grows out of the
Mississippi Delta. It teaches us that those who question America when
we allow fascists to rule are not un-American. They are, in fact, the
people who have helped America become more of what she claims to be.

So this 4th of July, may we all gather with Fannie Lou Hamer and the
moral fusion family closest to us – both the living and the dead –
to recommit ourselves to a government of the people, by the people,
and for the people. Yes, America’s fascists have the power today.
They will throw a party at our House and desecrate the memory of so
many who’ve worked to push us toward a more perfect union. But they
will not own our Independence Day. As long as we remember the moral
tradition that allowed Fannie Lou Hamer to host a July 4th picnic
while she battled the fascism of Jim Crow, we have access to the moral
resources we need to reconstruct American democracy today.

This is why today, as all American’s celebrate our nation’s
declaration of liberty and equality, we are announcing that the Moral
Monday campaign we’ve been organizing in Washington, DC, to
challenge the policy violence of this Big Ugly Bill is going to the
Delta July 14th for Moral Monday in Memphis. As we rally moral
witnesses in the city of Graceland and the Delta blues – the place
where Dr. King insisted in 1968 that the movement “begins and
ends” – delegations of moral leaders and directly impacted people
will visit Congressional offices across the South to tell the stories
of the people who will be harmed by the Big, Ugly, and Deadly bill
that Donald Trump is signing today.

Yes, this bill will kill. But we are determined to organize a
resurrection of people from every race, religion, and region of this
country who know that, when we come together in the power of our best
moral traditions, we can reconstruct American democracy and become the
nation we’ve never yet been.

Today’s neo-fascists have passed their Big Ugly Bill, but they have
also sparked a new Freedom Summer. We will organize those this bill
harms. We will mobilize a new coalition of Americans who see beyond
the narrow divisions of left and right. We will lean into the wisdom
of Ms. Hamer and Delta’s freedom struggle, and we will build a moral
fusion movement to save America from this madness.

_Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove: Author, preacher, & moral activist.
Assistant Director, Center for Public Theology & Public Policy at Yale
Divinity School._

_Bishop William J. Barber, II: President, Repairers of the Breach, &
Founding Director & Professor, Yale Center for Public Theology and
Public Policy. Author, WHITE POVERTY, WE ARE CALLED TO BE A MOVEMENT,
THE THIRD RECONSTRUCTION, REVIVE US AGAIN, & FORWARD_

_“Our Moral Moment” is a space to name the issue we face,
chronicle the moral movement that is rising to meet them, and build a
coalition big and broad enough to include all people of goodwill who
want to work together for truth, justice, and democracy.  _

_“Our Moral Moment” is and always will be free. We’re grateful
to readers who choose a paid subscription to support production
costs. Subscribe to Our Moral Moment w/ Bishop William Barber &
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove_

* Fannie Lou Hamer
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* mississippi freedom summer
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* Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
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* Donald Trump
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* budget cuts
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* Medicaid
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* July 4th
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* neo-fascism
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