Independence Day in a divided America

Those celebrating the Fourth of July in southern states today owe a debt to the emancipated African Americans who conserved the region’s patriotic inheritance in place of whites who abandoned them in those first postbellum years.

“Whereas whites expressed little interest in celebrating the Fourth following the surrender of General Lee’s forces, the new black ‘freedmen’ celebrations that took place throughout the South played a major role in assuring the Independence Day traditions of former times remained intact,” James R. Heintze writes in The Fourth of July Encyclopedia. “On July 4, 1865, in Raleigh, North Carolina, a large African-American parade that included a brass band processed from Guion Hotel to the ‘African Church’ where those assembled heard speeches and sang songs. In Newbern, North Carolina, on July 4, 1866, a parade hosted a ‘Freedman’s Bureau’ wagon covered with an immense American flag.”

That same encyclopedia notes many other occasions across the decades when the Fourth of July inspired attempts at patriotic unity amid difference. The nation’s July 4, 1876, centennial provided an occasion for North-South reconciliation, with Virginians raising the Star-Spangled Banner over the state capitol building in Richmond for the first time in 16 years. Also that year, Representative William T. Avery declared in a Memphis, Tennessee, oration, “This Fourth of July is a common heritage: it belongs to no North, no South, no East, no West.”