Whose Independence?: The Fourth of July and What It Really Means

Leid Stories wraps up its series on systems of white supremacy and their centrality to practically all aspects of life in the United States with two history lessons.

Dr. Gerald Horne, the John J. and Rebecca Moores chair of history and African American studies and professor of diplomatic history at the University of Houston and author of The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, explains the War of Independence as a counterrevolution by the power elite against the inevitability of the abolition of slavery by Britain.

The prescient words of Frederick Douglass still ring true. The late actor and activist Ossie Davis gives voice to “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” Douglass’s speech to the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, N.Y., on July 5, 1852.