How to Protest the Fourth of July

By Holly Jackson
Dr. Jackson is at work on a book about 19th-century radical movements in the United States.

July 3, 2018

How do you celebrate Independence Day? A cookout? Maybe take the kids to a parade?

William Lloyd Garrison, the 19th-century abolitionist, had a different idea for how to observe the
holiday. Every flag should be either taken down or flown at half-staff, he wrote in his newspaper,
The Liberator, and “all signs of exultation, parade and boasting should be studiously suppressed.”
The usual rounds of celebratory music, marching and fireworks must be abandoned until “the
millions of our oppressed countrymen are emancipated.” In the meantime, the Fourth of July
“should be made THE DAY OF DAYS for the overthrow of slavery.”

In our time, July 4 has become detached from the politics of protest. But the history of the United
States suggests that this need not — indeed, ought not — be the case.

Garrison borrowed the July 4 protest tradition from a group of black activists in Albany. When
slavery was legally abolished in New York on July 4, 1827, they resolved not to celebrate. Instead,
they mourned all those who remained in bondage and came out the following day for public
reflection on the nation that allowed it. This became a tradition that continued until the Civil War.

The most famous abolitionist July 4 protest took place in 1854, when Garrison mounted a platform
adorned with an upside-down, black-bordered American flag and burned a copy of the
Constitution. From the same stage that day, Henry David Thoreau declared that the moral failure
of the United States affected even his ability to enjoy the outdoors, noting that “the remembrance
of my country spoils my walk.”

For the better part of the 19th century, many groups in addition to abolitionists, including Native
Americans, utopian socialists, women’s suffragists and industrial workers, chose to use the
Fourth of July as an occasion for social-justice agitation.

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The tradition of July 4 protest faded in the 20th century, but it re-emerged in moments of political
urgency. Peace activists during the Vietnam War, for example, seized the day for fasts and
demonstrations. In 1970, a committee of African-American churchmen urged the black
community across the country not to participate in any festivities on July 4. Their “Black
Declaration of Independence” listed 15 grievances, including “being lynched, burned, tortured,
harried, harassed and imprisoned without Just Cause” and “being gunned down in the streets by
Policemen and Troops who are protected from punishment.”

In the weeks leading up to July 4, 1981, a group of military veterans, in a spirit of outraged
patriotism, staged a hunger strike to demand an independent review of Veterans Administration
hospitals, further study of the effects of Agent Orange and greater support for veterans’ mental
health. In 1986, when the Supreme Court upheld laws that criminalized sodomy between
consenting adults in private, gay activists held a rally in Greenwich Village in New York,
promising to “disrupt traffic, snarl subways and show our rage” during the city’s July 4
celebrations.

The tradition of July 4 protest has been largely dormant for a generation now — although the
rallies and “die-ins” staged during the July 4 Senate recess last year, protesting efforts to repeal
the Affordable Care Act, hinted at a revival. These days, many Americans seem to disapprove of
protests in general, and for them, demonstrations on the Fourth of July might seem particularly
offensive, even worse than taking a knee during the national anthem.

But this attitude fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the holiday. July 4 commemorates a
protest so incendiary that its participants, the signers of the Declaration of Independence, risked
execution as traitors to the crown. These dissidents came together to affirm their commitment to
a political community based on equality, at least in theory. For a century and a half, social-justice
activists honored this history by continuing it, trying to hold the nation to its own standards on
the anniversary of the day they were declared.

This July 4, on the heels of nationwide protests that mobilized hundreds of thousands of people in
opposition to immigration policy, we ought to ask again, what does it mean to celebrate America
now?

Holly Jackson, an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, is at work on a book about
19th-century radical movements in the United States.

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A version of this article appears in print on July 3, 2018, on Page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: How to Protest the Fourth of July