Freedom must be for all

SOUL FOOD

When I was growing up, my family’s Fourth of July celebrations were

different from year to year depending on where we lived.

We mostly lived on Marine Corps bases wherever my father was

stationed but when he was away for a tour of duty we lived in Mobile,

Ala., my mother’s hometown and my birthplace, where we were close to

a large extended family.

On the military bases there were always big fireworks displays to

celebrate Independence Day and, often, the revelry of a Marine Corps

band playing military and patriotic anthems.

As dusk turned to dark and fireflies flickered like low stars the

fireworks, invisible at first, would whistle their way to their mark,

spraying fountain upon fountain of iridescent lights above crowds of

families packed into bleachers.

In Mobile, we would cross the bay to pass the day where an aunt

and uncle had built a small house in the back woods of Baldwin County

on Fish River.

In the cool of the evening, after supper, we’d go down to the

wharf with handfuls white, paraffin candles and sturdy magnolia

leaves.

There, we’d sit attaching candles to leaves with bits of melted

wax until it got dark. Then one-by-one we would light the candles and

ever so gently set the leaves adrift in river.

As I watched our flotilla wind its way down the river, each one of

its candles mirrored in the river under a starry sky, my heart would

swell with a sense of how the world was large and life was full of

promise, like a present God gave us to open anew every day.

I was still too young on those Fourth of Julys to realize that was

truest, or perhaps only true, if one were free.

Not long after my last Fourth of July spent on the banks of Fish

River I would begin to change when I read “The Diary of Anne Frank,”

and “Black Like Me.”

The terrors endured by young Anne Frank and, closer to home, the

injustices of segregation and racism endured by John Howard Griffin

-- a white journalist who, through the miracle of a pigment-changing

medication, became for a time an unemployed black man in the Deep

South of the late 1950s -- awakened me.

After reading “Black Like Me,” I could never visit my hometown

again without wondering how different my life would have been if I

had been born black instead of white.

I wrestled to understand how certain men and women and children in

this country, because of the color of their skin, could be legally

denied the liberty its own “Declaration of Independence” proclaimed

to be endowed to them by their Creator.

How so many clergymen and theologians argued in favor of both

slavery and segregation is a conundrum.

In the days before the Fourth of July I often read a speech

titled, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” which I first

read nearly three decades ago.

The speech was written by Fredrick Douglass, a former slave and

abolitionist, and delivered by him on July 5, 1852 at an event that

commemorated the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

In part of his nearly 3,000-word text, Douglass wrote to the

people of a pre-Civil War United States:

“To [the American slave], your celebration is a sham; your boasted

liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity;

your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation

of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and

equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and

thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to

Him, 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 the United States, at this very

hour.”

It took the deadliest war of our nation’s history to change that.

Like a visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the Holocaust

Museum in Jerusalem or the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles,

Douglass’ words whisper, “Never forget.”

This weekend there will be parades and picnics, concerts and

fireworks. May there also be time to remember.

To remember those who have given their lives to secure for us a

freedom many will never have.

To remember, what our Declaration of Independence proclaims, “We

hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men 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.”

To remember, if it’s true at all, it’s true for all.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at michele@soulfoodfiles.com.