“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?”

Frederick Douglass, born into bondage in Maryland’s Talbot County, was not a mincer of words. He could not afford to be. As a Black abolitionist aware that many of those listening would be happiest with him back in chains, Douglass knew his words would make an impact when he opened his July 5, 1852 address with that line.

And points were made.

Douglass’ now-classic speech asked a very important question: What significance does a holiday ostensibly celebrating independence mean to those who are not independent, who are chattel? “I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham,” he said.

Again, not one word minced. Eleven years later, President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation officially proposed that the gap between the enslaved and the free might start closing. But this news did not reach everyone in the years before WiFi and radio, and it wasn’t until more than two years later, on June 19, 1865, that Union soldiers arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas, to inform about 250,000 Black people that they were truly free. The celebration of that event, for so long a mostly regional affair, came to be called Juneteenth.

We just celebrated only the third Juneteenth as a federal holiday, but are about to commemorate Fourth of July’s 153rd. To me, they complement each other: As much as I love a good firework, it is a fact that for a century after Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, that document had an asterisk attached for my ancestors toiling on plantations around the South. Juneteenth was a step toward making the words of Jefferson, who owned people, actually apply to everyone. It feels better, then and now, to celebrate at least the nominal correction of that asterisk, even in the face of the failure of Reconstruction, the erection of Confederate statues to intimidate Southern Blacks who thought of exercising their fragile new rights, and gerrymandering to stop them from voting.

Sadly, the thwarting continues.

This whole banning of books, fight against critical race theory and the full-throated lie of certain conservative presidential candidates of color that racism is over, pretends that everyone has always been as free as everyone else. It’s not true. But some of you don’t care about truth and are mad at a history that betrays your gauzy fantasy that everything is equal and those who watched those early fireworks in chains didn’t exist.

Juneteeth, then, has been attacked by those whose ego and paycheck depends on that erasure, with some claiming that we mean it to erase or replace July 4. I know a lot of Black people who don’t love Independence Day because our ancestors were not independent in 1776, but I have never heard anyone try to cancel the holiday. I am an American, and this is my holiday, too. But Juneteenth is an addendum, a reckoning. It was needed. You’re welcome to go to work on June 19 next year if you want. I’m taking it ALL.

I felt the impact of July 4 in 1983, when my family was not allowed to leave Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — where my parents were working — to spend the summer in Maryland because there had been some sort of issue with our visas. They literally held our passport and had to approve when we left. Our planned trip home in May came and went, as did all of June. On July 4, my dad called excitedly to tell us to pack, because we were finally booked on a flight to the United States that evening.

“We never unpacked,” my mother told him. On that date that meant so much in our home country but nothing to the folks where we were, my family knew that our freedom to come and go was conditional. It was the same way for my ancestors a century earlier in South Carolina, but in reverse: July 4 was a big deal for those who enslaved them, but a lie for the enslaved themselves.

And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with saying that. Why does confidence in this country’s promise require me to lie about how long these rights have legally existed for people who look like me?

I saw a video on Twitter of some ignorant woman loudly and proudly proclaiming that Juneteenth is “bullshit” because Black people want everything and what do white people get? Of course this is dumb — you get Fourth of July. If you were honest, you’d appreciate Juneteenth because it’s the culmination of the things you believe to be true, that everyone is equally free under the law. You’d be happy and not threatened by the acknowledgment that this American experiment designed to exclude me finally includes me.

As the descendant of those enslaved people that Douglass was talking about, July 4th is, to me, the marking of an incomplete promise. Juneteenth sought to make it more true. We still aren’t there at the equality stage, but it’s a start.

leslie.streeter@thebaltimorebanner.com