The Confederate flag, originally adopted in 1861, symbolizes racist oppression as evidenced by southern slavery. The United States flag, originally adopted in 1777, symbolizes racist oppression as evidenced by American slavery. In fact, one third of the 56 Founding Fathers who signed the Declaration of Independence enslaved Blacks. Furthermore, Thomas Jefferson, who drafted that document, which was ratified on July 4, 1776, still held 175 Black men, women and children in bondage on that same date and increased that number to 267 by 1822.
Such racist duplicity is what compelled Frederick Douglass in 1852 to give a speech entitled “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro.” In that unmasking and explosive elocution, he thundered: “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? 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, your boasted liberty, an unholy license, your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; … your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery … fraud, deception …, 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 ...”
Although Douglass was talking about America in general, he just as easily could have been talking about Philadelphia in particular. If you don’t believe me, go downtown and check out the historical marker at Front and Market, which is where the London Coffee House once stood on the southwest corner. Opened in 1754 with funds provided by more than 200 Philadelphia merchants, it was where businessmen, shippers and local officials, including the governor, socialized, drank coffee and alcohol, and ate while making deals. It also was where, on the Market Street side, auctions were held for carriages, foodstuffs and horses — and, by the way, for African human beings who had just been unloaded from ships that docked right across the street on the Delaware River. And here’s exactly what would happen: The captured Blacks, usually about five or six at a time, were placed on a thick wooden board, approximately three feet wide and eight feet long, set atop two heavy barrels on each end. These whipped and shackled people were paraded onto the boards, forced to slowly turn around and bend over, inspected by having their mouths forced open, their genitals grabbed and their limb muscles flexed, and then they were auctioned off to the highest bidder. Immediately afterward, they were heartlessly separated, mother from daughter, father from son, brother from sister, husband from wife. Following these forced separations, they were scattered across the country. And they would never touch or even see one another again.
And this all began in the country that would become America long before 1754. It was in 1619 that 60 men, women and children from the village of Ndongo in Luanda, Angola, were kidnapped by European raiders from Portugal and crammed onto the slave ship Sao Joao Bautista, headed to Mexico. However, that ship was intercepted by the Dutch pirate ship White Lion and the English pirate ship Treasurer in the waters of the North Atlantic, attacked and robbed of its entire cargo — including the 60 Africans, 20 of whom were placed on the White Lion that arrived in the Virginia Colony at Old Point Comfort (now Fort Comfort in Hampton) on Aug.20, 1619. When the Treasurer arrived four days later and attempted to trade the remaining 40 captives for supplies, they were rebuffed because their price was deemed too high. So they took their condemned human cargo to Bermuda’s hellish plantations in exchange for valuable corn.
But it wasn’t just a southern American thing. It was in the North, too. For example, slavery was an essential component of the day-to-day life in Pennsylvania generally and Philadelphia specifically. In the 1760s, nearly 4,500 enslaved Blacks labored like beasts of burden in the colony. About one of six white households in the city held at least one Black person in bondage. This cruel and peculiar institution began in this colony in 1684 when the slave ship Isabella, from Bristol, England, anchored in Philadelphia with 150 captured Africans. A year later, William Penn himself held three Black human beings in bondage at his Pennsbury manor, approximately a mere 20 miles north of Philadelphia.
Even George Washington, the most influential of the Founding Fathers, enslaved Blacks, 316 to be exact. And he illegally held nine of them right here in the City of Brotherly Love at America’s first “White House,” which was officially known as the President’s House at Sixth and Market streets. An organization called Avenging The Ancestors Coalition (ATAC) — of which I am one of the founding members — began an eight-year long battle in 2002 to avenge our enslaved ancestors with an official, conspicuous and technological memorial. In 2010, we won that battle when the historic Slavery Memorial/President’s House was opened to honor our courageous ancestors who were enslaved by President Washington at America’s first “White House,” which was in Philadelphia at the current site of the new Liberty Bell Center at Sixth and Market.
Each year since 2002, ATAC on July 4th continues to avenge our enslaved ancestors by proudly telling their story and the story of their oppressed descendants. That’s what July 4th means to Black people. That’s why we shouldn’t support the racism symbolized by the regional slavery-promoting Confederate flag or the racism symbolized by that flag’s national slavery-promoting mother, namely the American flag.
Attend ATAC’s annual event on Saturday, July 4, at 3:30 at Sixth and Market to avenge, not to celebrate. For more information, call ATAC at (215) 552-8751.
The words from David Walker’s Appeal, written in 1829, along with the words of Christopher James Perry Sr., founder of the Tribune in 1884, are the inspiration for my weekly “Freedom’s Journal” columns. In order to honor that pivotal nationalist abolitionist and that pioneering newspaper giant, as well as to inspire today’s Tribune readers, each column ends with Walker and Perry’s combined quote — along with my inserted voice — as follows: I ask all Blacks “to procure a copy of this … [weekly column] for it is designed … particularly for them” so they can “make progress … against [racist] injustice.”
Michael Coard, Esquire, can be followed on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. His “Radio Courtroom” show can be heard on WURD900AM.
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