🕯️Mourning in America
On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass stood before a crowd in Rochester, New York, and delivered a message that pierced the American conscience: “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.” While the nation celebrated liberty, Douglass mourned its failure to extend that liberty to all. His speech, What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?, was not a condemnation of hope, it was a lamentation of hypocrisy.
Now, nearly two centuries later, that lament echoes across the nation again.
The passage of the so-called Big Beautiful Bill has sparked fresh anguish. It delivers sweeping cuts to Medicaid, expands immigrant deportations, and threatens academic freedom at elite institutions. For many, it feels like a calculated attack on the fragile promise of justice, especially for the poor, the foreign-born, the sick, and the intellectually curious.
If Douglass were alive today, his voice might sound less like history and more like prophecy.
Liberty for Whom?
Douglass questioned the limits of American freedom. He confronted a country that lionized the Declaration of Independence while enslaving millions. Today’s politics repeat a similar betrayal.
The Big Beautiful Bill greenlights deportations to war-torn and unfamiliar countries, South Sudan among them, even for individuals with no ties to the region. It shreds asylum pathways and empowers mass removals. Just as Douglass once decried a system that hunted fugitives rather than recognizing their humanity, we now watch migrant workers, parents, and seekers denied the dignity of belonging.
Freedom Without Care
What use is freedom if one cannot afford to live?
The Bill slashes trillions from Medicaid and healthcare subsidies, jeopardizing coverage for millions of working-class and elderly Americans. Clinics will close. Medications will go unfilled. Douglass warned that liberty divorced from economic security was a cruel illusion, and in this, the echoes are unmistakable.
We cannot claim moral leadership while abandoning people at their most vulnerable. That is not liberty; rather, it is how a nation shows its neglect.
Silencing the Mind
Douglass taught himself to read in secret, knowing that literacy could liberate. He believed that education was the foundation of freedom.
Today, institutions like Harvard and Yale face political threats, unfounded accusations of “ideological poisoning,” and punitive funding proposals. The Big Beautiful Bill aims to suppress diverse thought, targeting programs that champion equity and academic freedom.
Targeting programs that champion equity and academic freedom is not merely censorship; it is a step backward. The fear of ideas is the fear of change. Douglass would have seen this moment not as a debate but as a spiritual danger.
We Mourn Because We Believe
To mourn a nation is to still believe in its soul.
Douglass mourned the Fourth of July not because he rejected America but because he demanded it grow. He insisted that it reckon with its contradictions, its cruelty, and its false pride, and find a path back to truth.
Today, as we confront exclusion, illness, exile, and suppression, we must adopt Douglass’ posture: sorrow and resolve. “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out the measure of injustice that a people will endure, and you have found the exact limits of tyranny that will be imposed on them until they are met by word or blow or both.”
Our mourning must fuel marches. Our grief must demand reform. Our pain must protect the dream. Our resolve must be in the spirit of 1776.
We are not lost, but we are called. And the memory of Frederick Douglass stands with us, demanding that justice no longer be postponed.
✍️ Author’s Note
I did not write this piece to condemn America—I wrote it because I believe it can still be better.
Frederick Douglass understood that critique without hope leads to despair, and hope without action is naïveté. In Mourning in America, I’ve tried to honor his clarity: that we can love a country enough to confront its failures and mourn its missteps without abandoning its promise.
The Big Beautiful Bill may stand as law, but it cannot be the last word. The deported, the uninsured, the silenced, the disillusioned, they deserve more than slogans. They deserve a country bold enough to see itself honestly and brave enough to change.
“I write not with bitterness but with conviction. That history repeats—but so does resistance. That memory burns—and so does justice. And that somewhere in the soul of this fractured republic, Douglass is still speaking.” — Harold Michael Harvey, July 4, 2025