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“DO YOU UNDERSTAND YOUR OWN LANGUAGE?”  
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Robin D. G. Kelley
June 24, 2026
Hammer & Hope
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_ Black radicals read the Declaration of Independence. _

Photographs via Library of Congress., Billie Carter-Rankin for Hammer
& Hope.

 

We the darker ones come even now not altogether empty-handed: there
are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the
Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes.

W. E. B. Du Bois, _The_ _Souls of Black Folk_ (1903)

very so-called Independence Day I made my kids listen to passages from
Frederick Douglass’s famous jeremiad “What to the Slave Is the
Fourth of July?” Standing before a gathering organized by the
Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society on July 5, 1852, Douglass
declared the nation’s celebration “a sham … [a] 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.” I wasn’t
alone. I knew of Black families for whom the reading of Douglass’s
address was as much a part of the Fourth of July festivities as
barbecue and fireworks.

As we approach the U.S. semiquincentennial, Douglass’s speech is in
constant rotation, one track in a cacophony of political noise
extending from Trump’s 1776 Commission and his Freedom 250
initiative to Ken Burns’s long-awaited 12-hour documentary _The
American Revolution_. Writers, judges, legal scholars, journalists,
pundits, and celebrities hoping to cash in on the nation’s 250th
birthday are making podcasts and pumping out books about the
Declaration of Independence and 1776, adding to the thousands of
volumes gathering dust in our libraries and filling the remainder bins
of most corporate bookstores.

Revisiting “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” underscores
the need for a critical and informed response to the spectacle
barreling toward us, whether it is coming from MAGA propagandists or
patriotic liberals who still believe we are on the path toward a more
perfect union. Black studies has long challenged right-wing and
liberal mythmaking, even at the expense of criticizing our own heroic
icons. For example, Douglass’s fury over the hypocrisy of the
Declaration is accompanied by a vigorous defense of the U.S.
Constitution as “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT” thoroughly opposed
to slavery. His insistence that slavery was unconstitutional and
contrary to natural law misjudged the foundational role of
enslavement, racism, and dispossession in the birth of the Republic
— what the late philosopher Charles W. Mills called “the Racial
Contract.”

The Declaration of Independence, however, is another matter. In 2014,
Gerald Horne challenged established U.S. historians with the
publication of _The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and
the Origins of the United States of America_, which argues that the
colonies declared independence in order to maintain and expand slavery
as Britain was moving inexorably toward abolition. The colonists may
have believed this when, in 1772, Lord Mansfield, chief justice of the
Court of King’s Bench, ruled in favor of James Somerset, a fugitive
who escaped his putative “master,” James Steuart, while on British
soil. After he was recaptured, abolitionists appealed to the high
court for his freedom. Mansfield’s ruling did not abolish slavery,
nor was it his intention to do so. His decision centered on whether or
not Steuart had the legal authority to forcibly seize him on English
soil absent a “positive” parliamentary law legalizing slavery. Yet
the Somerset ruling did not free all enslaved people in England.
American slaveholders’ fear that Mansfield’s ruling would apply to
the colonies turned out to be premature. The British crown’s ongoing
investment in the slave economy was evident in its decision to occupy
Saint-Domingue (Haiti) from 1793 to 1798, where it attempted to
restore slavery after Revolutionary France had abolished it, not to
mention the fact that slavery persisted in the British Empire until
1834 — facts Horne knows all too well. Still, I read Horne’s
subtle interpretation of the American Revolution as less a
counterrevolution than a struggle between factions of the same class
over who would benefit from the spoils of slavery, slave-produced
commerce, and Indigenous dispossession.

The Declaration’s significance extends far beyond the aims of the
American Revolution or an expression of American nationalism. For
Black thinkers, captive and fugitive, it was a referendum on the
definition of the human, a rhetorical weapon against America’s
conceits of liberty and democracy, and an exhortation on the right to
rebel. Black people did not need a document to justify revolt, but it
came in handy. It is most powerful when the people it was never meant
to represent grab hold of its language and toss it back like an
undetonated grenade, whether those hands belong to Denmark Vesey, Nat
Turner, Maria Stewart, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or Ho Chi Minh of
Vietnam. For these and other reasons, the Declaration should be read
as a core text in Black studies.

 

My first encounter with a Black studies interrogation of the
Declaration and the American Revolution was 45 years ago, when as an
undergraduate I read Felix Nwabueze Okoye’s provocative essay
“Chattel Slavery as the Nightmare of the American
Revolutionaries.” The Nigerian-born Okoye, a noted Africanist and
inaugural chair of the department of African and African American
studies at SUNY Brockport, wanted to understand why the patriots
persistently used the language of slavery to describe their condition.
Writing in the wake of the U.S. Bicentennial, Okoye contended that
white settler fear of being reduced to chattel slaves was the catalyst
for the American Revolution. He takes to task every historian of the
American Revolution for failing to see that the pamphlets, broadsides,
and oratory did not refer to political or metaphorical slavery but
dreaded the prospect of actual bondage. “What they feared,” Okoye
wrote, “was ‘unmerited slavery,’ a slavery that was passed on to
one’s descendants. What they detested was ‘ignominious slavery,’
a slavery that aroused feelings of shame in the breast of the
oppressed. What they scorned was ‘abject slavery,’ a slavery that
deprived its victims of all rights, a slavery whose elements were
‘cruel bondage and insults.’” In other words, servile status was
reserved for Africans, not white men.

The propagandists of the new Republic generally camouflaged the effect
of their proximity to the existing slave regime by invoking analogies
to lord-vassal relations in England or relations between dominant and
subordinate nations within Europe — anyplace but North America and
the Caribbean. It was enough to persuade subsequent historians that
chattel slavery had nothing to do with their fight. Their anxieties
were not always contained, however. Okoye quoted Richard Wells of
Philadelphia, who in 1775 explained his opposition to England’s 1766
Declaratory Act (also known as the American Colonies Act), which
asserted the Crown and the British Parliament’s absolute authority
over the colonies, by pointing out, “[W]hat security have we, that
they will not one day portion amongst themselves, our fair
inheritances, and force us into their new claimed fields, like _Guinea
slaves_ to till the soil?”

Ironically, this seemingly irrational fear of white Britons becoming
slaves partly drove legal arguments in the Somerset case. One of James
Somerset’s attorneys, Francis Hargrave, warned the court that a
ruling in favor of James Steuart would mean slavery “may be lawfully
imported into this country, at the discretion of every individual
foreign and native. It will come not only from our own colonies, and
those of other European nations; but … from every part of the world,
where it still continues to torment and dishonour the human species.
It will be transmitted to us in all its various forms, in all the
gradations of inventive cruelty; and by an universal reception of
slavery, this country, so famous for publick liberty, will become the
chief seat of private tyranny.” Slavery haunts not only the
colonists but the residents of the metropole, extending beyond the
Africans recognized for their “slavish servitude” to others,
perhaps even freeborn Englishmen. As the legal historian Michael
Meranze perceptively observes, Hargraves is here considering “not
only the liberty of Somerset, but also the liberty of all those around
him — whether enslaved or not. Slavery in this telling will infect
any constitutional order in which it is placed — infect it with
tyranny that is.”

For Okoye, the “nightmare” of being reduced to chattel, i.e.,
Negroes, represented the settler unconscious. He anticipated the work
of whiteness studies, especially David R. Roediger’s landmark 1991
work _The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American
Working Class_, one of the few texts of its time to cite Okoye. Yet
Okoye was interested less in whiteness than in taking historians to
task for failing to center slavery in studies of the American
Revolution and asking why the revolution had not generated a more
robust abolitionist impulse. While he was well aware of the few
18th-century white abolitionists, such as Samuel Hopkins, David
Cooper, Anthony Benezet, and John Woolman, who excoriated racism and
genuinely believed the Declaration’s assertion that “all men are
created equal,” he concluded that merely recognizing African
humanity and the inhumanity of slavery was not enough. “The true
friend of the slave,” Okoye wrote, “would not only call upon his
master to emancipate him but would also urge the man in chains to
murder his oppressor and reclaim his freedom.”

David Walker, the militant Black abolitionist intellectual, made the
same observation a century and a half earlier in his 1829 pamphlet,
_Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World_. Turning his attention
to white readers, he asked: “Do you understand your own language?
Hear your language, proclaimed to the world, July 4th, 1776. …
Compare your own language … extracted from your Declaration of
Independence, with your cruelties and murders inflicted by your cruel
and unmerciful fathers and yourselves on our fathers and on us — men
who have never given your fathers or you the least
provocation!!!!!!” He urged white people to read the text with
greater care, especially the passage asserting that it is both the
right and duty of oppressed people “to throw off such government,
and to provide new guards for their future security.” He then warned
that those who think Black people “will never throw off your
murderous government” ought to think again. Violent insurrection is
inevitable, he predicted, and anyone familiar with the Declaration
should already know that.

Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration’s principal author, as well as its
signatories must have known this, at least at the level of the
unconscious. The problem of slavery lay just beneath the surface of
the Declaration, buried in such a way that its seams remained visible
in the document’s final draft. Echoing the rhetoric of _Common Sense
_by Thomas Paine, published seven months earlier, the Declaration
charges King George III with fomenting insurrections by “merciless
Indian Savages” and enslaved Africans — the latter by recruiting
slaves to fight for the British in exchange for their freedom. He was
referring to the proclamation issued in 1775 by Lord Dunmore, the
royal governor of Virginia, offering freedom to African captives
willing to fight for the British. Paine himself, though often touted
as an abolitionist, had nothing to say about Black freedom in _Common
Sense_. Instead he presented Africans as merely a threat to white
liberty. An earlier draft of the Declaration repeated Paine’s
charges, accusing the “Christian King” of foisting slavery onto
the colonists, of “suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit
or restrain” the slave trade, and “exciting [the enslaved] to rise
in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has
deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them:
thus paying off former crimes committed against the Liberties of one
people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of
another.” To call this Jefferson’s “antislavery” passage is
misleading. It rebukes the Crown’s absolute power and claims the
moral high ground for the colonists without ever calling for the
abolition of slavery. And why should it? About three-fourths of the 56
signatories owned slaves, including its author. Still, Jefferson’s
vivid description of the slave trade as a “cruel war against human
nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in
the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating &
carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere” was too much for
the South Carolina and Georgia delegates, as well as Northerners
invested in the trade in humans and slave-produced commerce. Jefferson
later reflected in his _Autobiography_, “Our northern brethren also
I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for tho’ their
people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty
considerable carriers of them to others.”

Jefferson’s deleted paragraph nonetheless exposed yet another
dimension of the settler unconscious, the nightmare that would haunt
the American Republic to this very day. They were not only afraid of
_becoming_ slaves, they were terrified of _succumbing_ to Black
revolt, of being slain by their property. Even the final draft of the
document contains its share of Freudian projections. The
Declaration’s description of oppressions under the British mirrors
the rebels’ treatment of Africans and Indigenous people. Consider
the line about King George waging war on the colonists: “He has
plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed
the lives of our people.”

Roughly 20,000 enslaved Africans fought for the British in exchange
for their liberty, but countless others regarded the Declaration of
Independence as a general call for emancipation. Black people
weren’t naïve — they knew the “men” whose rights for whom the
text spoke did not include them. But that did not stop them from
proclaiming their unalienable right to liberty. Slaveholders, rebel
leaders, and local officials were deluged with petitions for
manumission based on the language of the Declaration. In 1777, a free
Black man named Prince Hall and seven others petitioned the
Massachusetts government on behalf of “a great number of Blacks
detained in a state of Slavery in the Bowels of a free & christian
Country” for their release from bondage. The petitioners cited their
“Natural and Unalienable Right to that freedom … Bestowed equally
on all mankind, and which they have Never forfeited by any Compact or
Agreement whatever.” They were not only claiming enslaved people’s
natural right to freedom but also charging their Christian owners and
the state with a crime. Africans, the petition argued, “were
Unjustly Dragged, by the hand of cruel Power,” and stolen from a
“populous, pleasant and plentiful Country and in Violation of Laws
of Nature and of Nation and in defiance of all the tender feelings of
humanity brought either to be sold like Beasts of Burthen & like them
Condemned to Slavery for Life.” In contrast to Paine, who declared
in _Common Sense_ that “Africa is in a state of barbarism,” Hall
and his fellow petitioners asserted their humanity, vindicated their
native land, and asserted the moral superiority of their own freedom
claims over settlers who hold their people in bondage. The petitioners
expressed their “Astonishments that It has Never Been Considered
that Every Principle from which America has Acted in the Course of
their unhappy Difficulties with Great Britain, Pleads Stronger than a
thousand arguments in favor of your Petitioners.”

Freedom suits came from Black women as well, disrupting both racial
and gendered assumptions as to who is entitled to rights and liberty.
“Men” in the Declaration is _not_ a universal, gender-neutral
category. Jefferson and his fellow signatories embraced parochialism;
African women demanded universalism. Emblematic of Black women’s
revolutionary universalism is Mum Bett (or Mumbet), a captive of
Colonel John Ashley, a slaveholder in Sheffield, Mass. In 1780, she
decided to sue for her freedom and that of all enslaved people in the
state, insisting that she had an inherent right to freedom and
Massachusetts never legalized slavery. Some accounts report that she
walked five miles from Ashley’s place to the home of Theodore
Sedgwick, a prominent lawyer and slaveholder himself, and asked him to
take her case, after hearing the new state constitution read aloud. It
is no small irony that both Ashley and Sedgwick helped draft the
Sheffield Declaration of 1773, also known as “Sheffield Resolves,”
widely understood to be a model for the Declaration of Independence.
Its first resolution states: “Mankind in a state of nature are
equal, free, and independent of each other, and have a right to the
undisturbed enjoyment of their lives, their liberty and property.”
Sedgwick and a lawyer named Tapping Reeve agreed to represent Bett and
an enslaved man named Brom in 1781 and won. Upon obtaining her
freedom, Mum Bett changed her name to Elizabeth Freeman.

These petitioners not only exposed the revolutionary ideals’ narrow
parochialism; they pushed at the limits of the Enlightenment’s
understanding of the human, defined, in the words of the scholar,
novelist, and playwright Sylvia Wynter, as “European Man.” Wynter,
along with Cedric Robinson, Edward Said, Aimé Césaire, and others,
has long argued that the Negro, the Savage, and the Oriental were
inventions. The modern world was built on such fabrications, and the
exclusionary definition of the human designating racial groups as
uncivilized and lacking the capacity for liberty not only justified
enslavement but also obscured the violence of dispossession. Under
settler colonialism’s herrenvolk democracy, freedom belonged to
white men, liberty meant the right to own and dispose of property —
including property in humans — and while the revolutionary cry for
equality partly leveled class distinctions, it reinforced racial
distinctions. Equality in this instance meant not being a slave.

Eighteenth-century Black thinkers understood their place in the
nascent racial regime, but they refused to accept it. Instead they
attributed their exclusion to cruelty, avarice, hypocrisy, and the
white elite’s limited capacity for reason. In a letter published in
the Connecticut Gazette on March 11, 1774, the poet Phillis Wheatley
told the Rev. Samson Occom, a member of the Mohegan Nation, that all
people are not only born free but are born with a “Love of
Freedom.” She found slaveholders fighting for freedom to be a
“strange Absurdity”: “How well the Cry for Liberty, and the
reverse Disposition for the exercise of oppressive Power over others
agree, I humbly think it does not require the Penetration of a
Philosopher to determine.” And yet it has taken a virtual army of
philosophers to evade.

These manumission petitions and Black antislavery jeremiads not only
refuse such philosophical evasions but also represent a radical
critique of “natural rights” discourse in this period that ought
to be read alongside Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke.
Arguably the sharpest and most sustained critique came from Quobna
Ottobah Cugoano’s 1787 text _Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of
Slavery_. Born in West Africa around 1757, Cugoano was kidnapped in
1770 and transported to Grenada. He was eventually purchased by a
British plantation owner who took him to England in 1772 — the same
year as the Mansfield decision — where he was freed in unknown
circumstances. His book argued that slavery is contrary not only to
natural and divine law but also to civil society, since the kidnapping
and selling of human beings is an act of theft — the theft of
liberty. But he didn’t stop there. According to the Black studies
scholar Anthony Bogues, Cugoano made a persuasive case that slavery,
as well as colonialism, also violates _reason_. Refuting claims that
Africans were inferior to Europeans and naturally servile, he argued
that Africans were “born as free, and are brought up with as great a
predilection for their own country, freedom and liberty, as the sons
and daughters of fair Britain.” He saw no separation among natural
liberty, civil liberty, and political liberty, making slavery in any
form incompatible with civilized society. In short, contrary to the
Enlightenment thinkers of his day, Cugoano concluded that natural
right meant, as Bogues explains, “the right of the individual to be
free and equal, not in relationship to government but in relationship
to other human beings.”

 

Thirty-two years after the publication of _Thoughts and Sentiments on
the Evil of Slavery_, the Rev. Jacob Gruber, a Methodist minister,
stood trial for inciting the enslaved to mutiny with his sermon at a
camp meeting in Maryland. More than 3,000 congregants, including about
400 Black people, most of them enslaved, gathered to listen to Gruber
preach from Proverbs 14:34, “Righteousness exalteth a nation, but
sin is a reproach to any people.” According to one witness, the
minister denounced slavery as a “national sin” and called
attention to “a great inconsistency in holding the Declaration of
Independence in one hand and a bloody whip in the other, and the blood
streaming from a negro’s back, literally cut to pieces.” At
Gruber’s trial, one of his attorneys delivered a brilliant opening
statement on freedom of speech and the Methodists’ obligation to
oppose slavery. He also turned to the Declaration of Independence to
criticize human bondage, which he argued had been imposed on the
American people by the British “while we were yet in a state of
colonial vassalage.” Slavery, the lawyer told the court, was “a
blot on our national character, and every real lover of freedom,
confidently hopes that it will be effectually, though it must be
gradually, wiped away. … And until it shall be accomplished: until
the time shall come when we can point without a blush, to the language
held in the Declaration of Independence, every friend of humanity will
seek to lighten the galling chain of slavery, and better, to the
utmost of his power, the wretched condition of the slave.” Gruber
was acquitted of all charges.

The lawyer’s name was Roger B. Taney. He went on to become chief
justice of the Supreme Court and the author of the majority opinion in
Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). By then, he no longer envisioned
slavery’s inevitable demise. On the contrary, his ruling legalized
slavery everywhere and declared Black people had never been citizens
of the U.S. and possessed no rights whatsoever. As evidence, he cited,
among other things, the Declaration of Independence. According to
Taney, “the men who framed this declaration were great men — high
in literary acquirements, high in their sense of honor, and incapable
of asserting principles inconsistent with those on which they were
acting. They perfectly understood the meaning of the language they
used, and how it would be understood by others; and they knew that it
would not in any part of the civilized world be supposed to embrace
the negro race, which, by common consent, had been excluded from
civilized Governments and the family of nations, and doomed to
slavery. They spoke and acted according to the then established
doctrines and principles, and in the ordinary language of the day, and
no one misunderstood them.”

David Walker disagreed. He exhorted Americans to “understand your
own language,” to recognize how its radical call for equal rights
and rebellion could blow up in their faces. Taney, by contrast,
conspired with the original signatories to occlude the Declaration’s
faint antislavery echoes.

It didn’t work. Two years later, the abolitionist John Brown rewrote
the Declaration to create an unambiguous abolitionist document. Dated
July 4, 1859, “A Declaration of Liberty by the Representatives of
the Slave Population of the United States of America” replicates the
original Declaration’s opening lines before turning to America’s
crimes:

The history of Slavery in the United States, is a history of injustice
& Cruelties inflicted upon the Slave in every conceivable way, & in
barbarity not surpassed by the most Savage Tribes. It is the
embodiment of all that is Evil, and ruinous to a Nation; and
subversive of all Good. …

[The government has] refused to grant Petitions presented by numerous
& respectable Citizens, asking redress of grievances imposed upon us,
demanding our Liberty & natural rights. With Contempt they Spurn our
humble petitions; and have failed to pass Laws for our relief. …
They have abdicated government among us, by declaring us out of their
protection, and waging a worse than cruel war upon us continually.

“A Declaration of Liberty” and Brown’s “Provisional
Constitution and Ordinance for the People of the United States” were
direct refutations of Taney’s opinion, which had proved to Brown
that the federal government sanctioned and sustained the institution
of slavery. Slavery was a national crime, and the federal government
was slavery’s prime source of authority and protection — hence
Brown’s decision to attack the federal armory and arsenal at Harpers
Ferry, Va. He and his small army of 16 white men and five Black men
— Osborne Perry Anderson, John Anthony Copeland Jr., Shields Green,
Dangerfield Newby, and Lewis Sheridan Leary — took on the federal
government and the Southern planter class in what seemed like a
foolhardy attempt to free four million Black people held in bondage.
They were defeated, with 10 killed in the attack and Brown and six of
his men captured and executed, but within two years the nation was at
war over the fate of slavery. Walker’s prediction was fulfilled.

The end of chattel slavery did not diminish the significance of the
Declaration for Black movements and letters. Its principles of consent
of the governed and the right of the people to alter or abolish
“destructive” governments took on even greater importance as
African Americans fought disenfranchisement, segregation, and state
violence. When Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale drafted the Black
Panther Party’s Ten Point Program in 1966, they chose to end
point 10, demanding “land, bread, housing, education, clothing,
justice, and peace” and recognizing Black people in the United
States as colonial subjects, with the first two paragraphs of the
Declaration of Independence verbatim.

Tellingly, as the uses of the Declaration shifted more toward
democracy and the right to revolt with the advance of the 20th
century, Black leaders seemed to embrace the document’s original
gender conventions. Men, in other words, meant men. The same year the
Black Panthers were formed, a group of Black clergy influenced by
Black Power and Black liberation theology, launched the National
Committee of Negro Churchmen (later the National Committee of Black
Churchmen, or NCBC). Four years later, in July 1970, the NCBC issued
its “Black Declaration of Independence,” which appeared as a
full-page ad in The New York Times. The document echoes the language
of the original Declaration but quickly pivots to addressing the
unique history and status of African Americans. It affirms the
equality of “men” but adds that “when this equality and these
rights are deliberately and consistently refused, withheld or
abnegated,” the people are duty-bound to rise up in rebellion: “it
is the Right of the Minorities to use every necessary and accessible
means to protest and to disrupt the machinery of Oppression.” Its
list of abuses includes racism, economic exploitation, inadequate
education, housing, denial of political representation, unremitting
police violence, the militarized occupation of black communities
“without the consent of our People,” and being subject to
compulsory military draft “to bear arms against their black, brown
and yellow Brothers, to be the Executioners of these Friends and
Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.”

So whose Fourth of July is it, really? If the long movement for Black
freedom claimed the Declaration and its various revisions as weapons,
inspirations, a North Star, a nightmare, then the Fourth of July is
ours, too. But not to commemorate a nation’s birthday, and certainly
not to celebrate the “birth of freedom.”

_ROBIN D. G. KELLEY is a professor of American history at UCLA and
the author of __Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great
Depression_
[[link removed]]_, __Freedom
Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination_
[[link removed]]_,
and other books._

_HAMMER & HOPE is a new magazine of Black politics and culture. It is
a project rooted in the power of solidarity, the spirit of struggle,
and the generative power of debate, all of which are vital parts of
our movement toward freedom._

_We are inspired by the courageous Black radicals in Alabama whose
lives and struggles to organize against capitalism and white
supremacist terror in the 1930s and 1940s are memorialized in Robin
D. G. Kelley’s book Hammer and Hoe, __from which we take our
name._ [[link removed]]

_We will envision collectively what a better future might look like
and the strategies that could get us there. Such an undertaking
compels us to deepen our knowledge of history, politics, culture, and
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the electric spirit of the protesters who flooded the streets in
2020._

_Come join us. We have a world to win._

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* July 4th
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* Frederick Douglass
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* slavery
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* Great Britain
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* liberty
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* democracy
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* African Americans
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* African American studies
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* settler colonialism
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* revolution
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* U.S. history
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