There is a disconnect between what we know in Memphis about freedom and the history being performed at the forefront of America’s 250th Independence Day celebration.
Black Americans understand this paradox well and Memphis, as an American city, serves as a mirror to it. These bluffs on the Mississippi River were witness to the height of the genocidal Trail of Tears and the violence that comes with the mass trade of enslaved people.
“The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie,” wrote the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones in a 2019 essay. “Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4, 1776, proclaims that ‘all men are created equal’ and ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.’ But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst.”
When the ideal is a lie, we can believe in the light of the people. MLK50 visual journalist Kevin Wurm found some of that light in the freedom celebrations of Juneteenth across the city last month. He talked to Black Memphians about the city and America as they celebrated the holiday commemorating the full freedom for which they fought, but maybe have not always been afforded.
In one of Memphis’s oldest Black neighborhoods, the north Memphis community of Douglass, the city’s oldest Juneteenth celebration is hosted. That community, established in 1907 by a Black man for Black people, and the park where the festivities take place are both named after Fredrick Douglass, the abolitionist writer. In 1852, Douglass delivered his “To What Is A Slave The Fourth of July” speech at an Independence Day celebration. “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine,” he said to a crowd. “You may rejoice, I must mourn.”
Douglass could not know the resonance of his words today. They continue:
“I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. 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.”
Read and listen to some of the conversations below.
SAKOU KAMAU, 75, Vollentine-Evergreen
“You know, America was, came about on the premise of, equality, man being treated as, human beings, not as, chattel as we were treated when we were kidnaped off the shores of West Africa and brought here to make this country wealthy. You know, so as there’s very little about America that I don’t understand and appreciate, I appreciate it for what its aspirations and capabilities are. But it hasn’t reached that point yet. And I see that as my role. Part of our role as Africans in America is to make America, as they say, what it ought to be, what it should be. What it started out being.
But we gotta understand the contradiction that the Founding Fathers had been liberators from Europe, but at the same time subjecting a whole classification of people, as slaves, taking away their humanity in order to build what we appreciate today.”
PATRICIA JACKSON, 53, Whitehaven
“The freedom that my parents had. Everything. It means a lot to me.
And when you say freedom, what do you mean?
We ain’t slaves no more. We’re free. Free to do what we want to do and go where we want to go. Other than that, that’s it.”
DANNY STRONG, 65, South Memphis
“Memphis means to me: family, home, community. It takes a village to raise your kids, so it takes a whole community to raise a community, you know what I’m saying? Everybody needs to come together like that. That’s me. That’s what I feel.”
VALENCIA PERKINS, 31
“What does it mean to be an American? I don’t really… I mean, I want to say the generic answer: to be an American, it means to be free, but, as an African American, I’ve dealt with racism, on my job and especially as a young Black woman, corporate America is not fair to young Black women, so…
It’s giving, we’re not really free. It’s giving, that it’s an illusion. So I’ve always kind of thought that, like, being an American is an illusion that we clap or applaud, but it’s not really there.”
DEONTAY JONES, 39, Orange Mound
“Memphis means culture to me. A blue collar city, just community, people coming together, Black history, Black excellence. it’s just everything, the culture of Black.”
CIVIL MILLER-WATKINS, 60, Fayette County
“America means to me a country that will live up to its creed. As a Black person, as a Black mom of eight children with 13 grandchildren. I just want America to live up to what’s on the paper. And so when it lives up to what’s on the paper about being free, about liberty, about the pursuit of happiness: we all want that to happen. Yeah. That’s what America means to me. Freedom.
Can we all be free?
I feel most American when I’m standing in front of my 8th grade math students and I can see light bulbs go off and I know that the future generations, what we do now will be for them. And so as long as I am sowing into fertile ground, I know that when they get older, our country will be even better.
So that’s what makes me excited to be an American, to look into the eyes of our young people. And see hope.
And we all have to have hope because even Jesse Jackson said ‘keep hope alive.””
TERI WHITE, 65, Orange Mound
“You’re asking me, what has America given me?
They’ve given me the opportunity to live, to have my own business, to be able to come to a community center where others at my age can just get along and do things together, still live as one and be a part of a team, a team effort, and I think that’s just wonderful.”
JUSTIN MERRICK, 40
“What does it mean to be American? I think, for me…what it means to be American is just actually just privilege. We have privilege.
When do I feel most American? It’s when I’m not in America. It’s a reminder of the privilege, that we, that we have. And maybe even our unkept responsibility.”
REBECCA BUTCHER, 33, Whitehaven
“What it means to me to be American is to have the freedom of speech that the Constitution endows upon us all.”
Kevin Wurm, a MLK50: Justice Through Journalism visual journalist, is a Report for America corps member and a CatchLight Local fellow. Email him at kevin.wurm@mlk50.com
Andrea Morales is the creative director at MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. Email her at andrea.morales@mlk50.com
This story is brought to you by MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, a nonprofit newsroom focused on poverty, power and policy in Memphis. Support independent journalism by making a tax-deductible donation today. MLK50 is also supported by these generous donors.