©Wendell Griffen, 2026
July 4, 2026
Little Rock, Arkansas
My fellow Americans,
I offer these words today after having first read aloud, and publicly, the matchless words Frederick Douglass delivered on Monday, July 5, 1852, at Rochester, New York. My regard for the comfort and patience of the listening audience impels me to limit my assessment about the semi quincentennial. Another reason for brevity is because my sentiments about the current condition of the United States that I cannot express my opinion in one setting.
I begin by thanking Garbo Hearne and Dr. Archie Hearne for Pyramid Art, Books, & Custom Framing, the site of our gathering. I thank them for the invitation to read the words from Mr. Douglass and share my feeble commentary. And I thank each of you for your presence and kind attention.
You have heard me read the words that Frederick Douglass spoke one day short of 174 years ago. Before I share my assessment about the state of U.S. democracy on this 250th Fourth of July, I ask your indulgence to hear words written by another, and certainly more noteworthy, observer about what he termed the “tenacious” issue of equality in our society.
The January 1969 issue of Playboy magazine contained an opinion article titled A Testament of Hope. It was written by Martin Luther King Jr., and published posthumously, beginning at pages 313-28 of a compendium of Dr. King’s writings, speeches, and interviews under the same title that was edited by James Melvin Washington, a noted King scholar. Listen to these excerpts from A Testament of Hope, the last published essay that King wrote.
Why is the issue of equality still so far from solution in America, a nation that professes itself to be democratic, inventive, hospitable to new ideas, rich, productive, and awesomely powerful? The problem is so tenacious because, despite its virtues and attributes, America is deeply racist and its democracy is flawed both economically and socially. All too many Americans believe justice will unfold painlessly or that its absence for black people will be tolerated tranquilly.
Justice for black people will not flow into society merely from court decisions nor from fountains of political oratory. Nor will a few token changes quell all the tempestuous yearnings of disadvantaged black people. White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society. The comfortable, the entrenched, the privileged cannot continue to tremble at the prospect of change in the status quo.
…When millions of people have been cheated for centuries, restitution is a costly process. Inferior education, poor housing, unemployment, inadequate health care —each is a bitter component of the oppression that has been our heritage. Each will require billions of dollars to correct. Justice so long deferred has accumulated interest and its cost for this society will be substantial in financial as well as human terms…
The price of progress would have been high enough at the best of times, but we are in an agonizing national crisis because a complex of profound problems has intersected in an explosive mixture… Schools, transportation, water supply, traffic and crime would have been municipal agonies whether or not Negroes lived in our cities. The anarchy of unplanned city growth was destined to confound our confidence. What is unique to this period is our inability to arrange an order of priorities that promises solutions that are decent and just.
…
It is time that we stopped our blithe lip service to the guarantees of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. These fine sentiments are embodied in the Declaration of Independence, but that document was always a declaration of intent rather than of reality. There were slaves when it was written; there were still slaves when it was adopted; and to this day, black Americans have not life, liberty nor the privilege of pursuing happiness, and millions of poor white Americans are in economic bondage that is scarcely less oppressive…
…
The question that now faces us is whether we can turn the Negro’s disillusionment and bitterness into hope and faith in the essential goodness of the American system. If we don’t, our society will crumble.
…This is not a nation of venal people. It is a land of individuals who, in the majority, have not cared, who have been heartless about their black neighbors because their ears are blocked and their eyes blinded by the tragic myth that Negroes endure abuse without pain or complaint. Even when protest flared and denied the myth, they were fed new doctrines of inhumanity that argued that Negroes were arrogant, lawless and ungrateful. Habitual white discrimination was transformed into white backlash. But for some, the lies had lost their grip and an internal disquiet grew. Poverty and discrimination were undeniably real; they scarred the nation; they dirtied our honor and diminished our pride. An insistent question defined evasion: Was security for some being purchased at the price of degradation for others? Everything in our traditions said this kind of injustice was the system of the past, or of other nations. And yet there it was, abroad in our own land.
Thus, was born – particularly in the young generation – a spirit of dissent that ranged from superficial disavowal of the old values [militarism, racism, and materialism] to total commitment to wholesale, drastic and immediate social reform. Yet all of it was dissent. Their voice is still a minority; but united with millions of black protesting voices, it has become a sound of distant thunder increasing in volume with the gathering of storm clouds. This dissent is America’s hope… Today’s dissenters tell the complacent majority that the time has come when further evasion of social responsibility in a turbulent world will court disaster and death. America has not changed because so many think it need not change; but this is the illusion of the damned… America must change.
Dr. King’s perspective before he was murdered 58 years ago was that “America must change” or be damned by the illusion that it need not change. Today we see that America has not changed.
The election of Barack Obama in 2008 and the tenure of Kamala Harris as Vice President of the United States during the Biden presidency occurred in a society that remained in the deadly grip of racism, materialism, and militarism.
Maternal mortality among black women is not only high but is being ignored by health professionals and the nation.
Public education is being defunded, privatized, and cannibalized in service to a neoconservative ideology that smacks of the Confederate States of America.
We must acknowledge that witting cooperation of some privileged black people with racist, capitalist, and militarist dystopian actions is working to perpetuate systemic injustice and further inspire resentment, disillusionment, and protest. Justice Clarence Thomas is not the only example. Kay Cole James, a black woman, led the Heritage Foundation from January 2018 until March 2022. She is now Secretary for the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Their examples are repeated across the nation, and in Arkansas.
Fifty-eight years after King’s death and 250 years after the first Fourth of July, King’s hope that the United States would change has not yet borne fruit. Instead, our nation is a crumbling empire suffering from the greed, cruelty, and incompetence of a sociopathic idiot, his pseudo-religious fascist supporters, and what Rollo May called “pseudo-innocence” in his 1972 book Power and Violence. Allan Aubrey Boesak echoed Rollo May’s concern in his 1976 book Farewell to Innocence.
We are not more free, wise, or kind now than the white men who founded this nation 250 years ago. This week’s Supreme Court decisions are not the only evidence why we should question whether the nation believes in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all people, let alone whether we are willing to work, fight, and even die to ensure that our descendants will live in such a society. The presidential election of 2016, January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, presidential election of 2024, and the tyrannical conduct by national, state, and local political leaders since 2024 are compelling proof that tens of millions of people in the United States do not believe in the ideal of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness for all people.
On the 250th anniversary of the Fourth of July, we will be dismissed as fools or frauds if we claim that racism, militarism, and materialism have subsided.
On the 250th anniversary of the Fourth of July, we will be dismissed as fools or frauds if we claim that we confronted and corralled the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism. We have added sexism (including homophobia and transphobia), imperialism, classism, techno-centrism, and xenophobia.
What King viewed as “giant triplets” – racism, materialism, and militarism – have been bred and fed so much that democracy in the United States is on the brink of ending because the “giant triplets” are now octuplets being constantly fed by mass media, willful miseducation, hateful religious-inspired bigotry, naked and unparalleled greed, commercialized cruelty, and lust for domination and white male supremacy.
Each of us must answer some pressing questions.
Do we believe that the ideals of life, liberty, and justice for all persons are worthwhile for our society?
Do we have the courage, determination, and commitment to communal well-being to work for them, fight for them, and even suffer and die to achieve them?
If we will not or cannot answer “yes” to those questions, we will continue having Fourth of July observances. We will continue hearing renditions of what Frederick Douglas said 174 years ago.
Meanwhile, our Fourth of July gatherings will be dismissed as shams by people who recall how Americans profaned the sacrifices of millions of people across our history by political apathy, civic atrophy, and moral lunacy.
Our young people and their descendants will curse our self-delusion, insincerity, and their plight. They will be right to do so.
Now, then, as in 1852, these words ring true. At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
On this 250th anniversary I borrow from Frederick Douglass and pose this question. What to the American indigenous, black, Latino, Asian Pacific, immigrant, women and girls, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and poor white population is our 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to them, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which they are constant victims.
To them, our celebration is a sham; our boasted liberty, an unholy license; our national greatness, swelling vanity; our denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; our shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; our prayers and hymns, our sermons and thanksgivings, with all our religious parade and solemnity, are, to them, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes that would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloodier, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me today, as Frederick Douglass said 174 years ago, that for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, the pretentiously titled United States of America still reigns without a rival.
Until we admit that this is who we are we will never be free or just. We will simply be the biggest and most dangerous curse on the world.
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