Douglass called the Fourth of July a hollow mockery in 1852, and nothing has changed except that the empire is now more corrupt, more unequal, and more at war than the founders imagined.
As with most years around the so-called Independence Day “holiday,” the Black masses and our accomplices of all races and ethnicities reflect on the sage words offered by Frederick Douglass on July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York: What to the Slave is the 4th of July. Therein, Douglass at one point declares, “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine, You may rejoice, I must mourn.” The speech shall be heralded in the annals of U.S. history for time immeasurable with warrant, yet from the outset it contained a ubiquitous contradiction as it actually praises the white men - many of them slaveowners and some of them rapists of African women - known to this day as the “founding fathers.” Douglass proclaimed, “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.” He continued, “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.”
This was clearly a strategic exercise to set up his greater polemic of the nation’s hypocrisy for not living up to the ideals and tenets of these “founding fathers” due, specifically, to the practice of chattel slavery on stolen lands that espoused the ethos of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in its founding document, the Declaration of Independence (the “Declaration”). On this point, Douglass offered, “Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?” This, of course, was a rhetorical question, which Douglass confirms when he went on to say, “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,” and strikes at the heart of the Declaration’s abject hypocrisy by affirming, “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.”
In this 250th year since the Declaration was drafted, signed, and delivered to King George, it can be argued that Douglass sugarcoated the material conditions of the then 76-year old settler colonial project nation. The “founding father” who, perhaps, most demonstrates Douglass’s sugarcoating through prescient commentary and admonishments was this nation’s fourth president, James Madison. Madison, who is also regarded as the “Father of the Constitution” for his role in drafting and promoting the document, including its first 10 amendments known as the Bill of Rights, predicted, “We are free today substantially, but the day will come when our Republic will be an impossibility. It will be an impossibility because wealth will be concentrated in the hands of a few.” The prescription for such a junction, according to Madison, is “A Republic cannot stand upon bayonets, and when the day comes when the wealth of the nation will be in the hands of a few, then we must rely upon the wisdom of the best elements in the country to readjust the laws of the nation to the changed conditions.” According to the group, inequality.org, “Federal Reserve data shows that the richest 10 percent of American households now own over two-thirds of the nation’s total wealth. The top 1 percent holds 31.0 percent of total wealth – just slightly less than the entire bottom 90 percent of U.S. households.” Adding to this oligarchal scenario is the current president of the U.S, Donald J. Trump, who has used his station to enrich himself and his family to the tune of $2.2 billion in 2025 alone. This trend, in itself, vindicates all that Madison warned of - the question then becomes, what is this wisdom of the best elements in the country that he speaks of. Yet, it must be named that while Madison may have been prescient, he was also a major element of this settler colonial nation’s primordial hypocrisy as a slave holder himself that, on the one hand, characterized slavery as a “moral evil,” while on the other upheld the idea of a racial hierarchy.
Historian Scott Horton may give us some idea of how to answer this question in part of the remarks he gave to the University of Alabama Law School in 2011. Therein, Horton suggests, “...it is not possible to preserve a republic without being conscious of first principles and constantly returning to them. More than flags and insignia, first principles define the nation and provide a living link to the past.” So let’s discuss these “principles” as they pertain to the U.S. As Douglass noted in his speech, the principles of the U.S. are rooted in abject hypocrisy, and the hypocrisy is rooted in the white “supremacy” ideology ensconced in the very fabric of a 250 year old nation that has become nothing more than a toxic and iniquitous corporate empire that suppresses and subjugates colonized and oppressed people both domestically and globally.
White “supremacy” ideology has always been the driving force of the U.S. - even at points in its history when it was seemingly doing the right thing to “appeal to the better angels” in pursuit of a more perfect union. From the “founding fathers” to the “great emancipator,” Abraham Lincoln, who himself declared he would preserve a white supremacist construct like chattel slavery if it was possible to do so and preserve the union from schism. This settler colonial nation has demonstrated time and time again that preservation of the union requires the preservation of white “supremacy” ideology. And an ideology like white “supremacy” can only be preserved through war that is informed and supplemented by imperialism and colonialism. Lenin confirms this with by defining imperialism as, “capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.” Applying this characterization to the modern-day U.S. is both accurate and irrefutable.
Empires like the U.S. are maintained by endless war - and the U.S. has become the world’s premier war machine, from Iran, to Cuba, to the Middle East, the bloody hand of U.S. empire has left its mark, which is to say nothing of its pestilent military bases, 750 that infect 80 countries the world over - or 41% of the earth’s countries. This, as Black Alliance for Peace National Co-Coordinator Erica Caines points out, is the epitome of “full spectrum domination,” in service to white “supremacy” ideology and racialized monopoly capitalism. Madison himself warned that a nation entrenched in endless war is not sustainable, “The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
What do we have before us then but a settler colonial nation that itself has become the very corporation that Madison decried, an inequality of fortunes, a toxic panoply of fraud, and a perpetual state of war? And if these attributes define the nation, what are we celebrating and why are we so many about to rhapsodic while commemorating a document that Douglass adroitly weighed, measured, and found wanting? Has it not been determined that we are living in the heart of a bellicose empire that exercises a praxis of global and domestic colonialism? If so, then it’s incumbent upon us to heed the words of Robert L. Allen who in , Black Awakening in Capitalist America, reminds us, “In fact, colonial rule is predicated upon an alliance between the occupying power and indigenous forces of conservatism and tradition.” In short, after 250 years of theft, rape, murder, genocide, and profound corruption, the U.S. has become the same nation the “founding fathers” deemed necessary to “dissolve the political bands” with.
A nation with an imperial president who has engendered comparisons to King George, presiding over public institutions that have been rendered into instruments that serve the oligarchs more than the people, can no longer even pretend to be a democracy when it’s nothing more than an institutionalized monarchy. Therefore, through the own words of the Declaration of Independence, we, the masses, have every right to declare ours from this quagmire and sadistic swamp of imperialism. Have we not "petitioned for redress in the most humble terms” - ask the non-profits and their endless sign-on letters and petitions they ask you to sign every damn week; yes, we have. Have our “repeated Petitions…been answered only by repeated injury?” Is this nation for two and a half centuries not guilty of subjecting colonized, oppressed, poor, and working class people to the litany of claims contained in the Declaration, including, but not limited to:
- Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us;
- For protecting them [the troops in the form of militarized police and ICE], by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
- Cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
- Imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
- Depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury; and
- Taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments?
Contrary to Douglass’s mordancy of the Declaration, perhaps it’s time we see it and use it as a tool for our separation from the state of this union and the material conditions it engenders. Instead of celebration, it’s time to declare our collective independence through collective revolution. At the same time, we must not allow for revolution to become, as Allen names, “a cheap word in modern America.” We must, as Allen also prescribes, “probe beyond oratory and rhetoric.” The empire is crumbling in front of our very eyes, what we choose to see and how we choose to respond will determine if we will ever do what is necessary to dispatch the tyranny of racial capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism and become the wisdom of the best elements that Madison names, such that we readjust and transform the nation into a proletariat dictatorship.
No Compromise
No Retreat
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright is an international climate and environmental liberation advocate, a racial justice practitioner, and a writer and policy expert residing in the United States with his family and their mischievous cat, “Evil” Ernie. He is a proud and active member of the Black Alliance for Peace and the Movement for Black Lives. His radio program, “Full Spectrum with Anthony Rogers-Wright,” airs on the Mighty WPFW network every Tuesday at 6:00 PM EST.
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