‘Sixty Years Since March On Washington, The Chains Remain’

Photo caption: SIXTY YEARS SINCE the historic March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963, writer John Fountain says the chains of slavery remain, “slavery of a different kind. Slavery of the mind.” (Photo: Shutterstock, Design: John Fountain)

As celebrations flickered like fireworks against a black night sky, I sat pensively on the sidelines, refraining from any declarations of “freedom.” Even amid this my beloved country’s festive observance of liberty and the Fourth of July, and on the verge of the 60th anniversary of the historic March on Washington, of all the things I am as a Black man in America, the one thing I am not is free. At least, I do not feel free. Therefore, I do not, cannot, act free. For I am not free.

Sixty years since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared in his “Dream” speech on Aug. 28, 1963, that the civil rights marchers had come to the nation’s capital “to remind America of the fierce urgency of now,” 160 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, my spirit ear can hear my African-American ancestors tearfully whispering, “The Negro still is not free…”

Not free as a citizen as set forth by the Declaration of Independence’s own words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Here in 21st century America, I am not yet removed from the legacy, bondage and far-reaching and lasting tentacles of slavery. I am not white free. Not American free. The Fourth of July, in all of its revelry and glory, and the state of Black life in America taunt me.

Frederick Douglass, in a piercing speech at Rochester, New York’s Corinthian Hall on July 4, 1852, levied the question: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th 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,” Douglass continued.

One hundred seventy-one years later, I find the words of the great orator and abolitionist still relevant, in fact, profoundly resonant—particularly amid the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision, banning the use of race as a factor in college admissions and essentially signaling quite possibly the beginning of the end of affirmative action. The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision turned back the clock on diversity, equity and inclusion; reiterated that the more things change with regard to racial inequality and injustice, the more they stay the same. The decision, in effect, proved once again that so-called freedom and equality for African Americans skates on thin ice, which daily cracks disconcertingly beneath the weight of American hate and hypocrisy.

It leaves me scratching my head.

How can 45 years or 60-plus years of affirmative action undo or compensate for the disenfranchisement, denial and devastation of nearly 250 years of American slavery, scores of years of Jim Crow, and 400 years of systemic racism that today is embedded in U.S. institutions and has become as American as baseball, hotdogs and apple pie?

Free? I’m not free. Not yet liberated in a country that I love but still hates me.

‘Slave To This Reality’

I sip my cup of Starbucks in south suburban Chicago, visions of the chains that remain on Black life in America swirling inside my head. They glare as discomfortingly as the hot sun on this Fourth of July.

Although I was born “free” in the USA in this brown skin, unlike my enslaved maternal great-great-grandfather, I am still in many ways a slave. A slave to the written and unwritten laws and policies of the land that inhibit my freedom as an American, or that seek to continue to relegate me as an African American to society’s bottom rung.

No matter the degree of my successful extrication from poverty, my achieved level of education, or how much money I could ever make, I have not yet in my 62 years been able to escape the curse of the color of my skin. I am, in the words of Jay-Z, “still nigga.”

Outside the insular shelter of my status as a university professor and journalist—I am still, after all these years, America’s most hated, most feared, less than human. Still only a beast in this land I so love. I fight to maintain my sanity, my sense of my own humanity. I fight against the tide.

I tell myself that I am equal to, not less than. Not an animal, not a ‘coon, not a monkey or an ape, but a man. An American.

And yet, I cannot deny that I am a slave to my country’s mental cruelty, to her hate. No matter how many times I declare my love and devotion for her.

On the streets of America, in the paradigm of white America at large, I am the first suspect, killer, mugger, rapist. Mine is the face of mass incarceration. Mine is the blood spilled by police assassination.

All day long, I am slain across this nation, even by my own brother, to the tune of fratricide. Or is it genocide?

I can run but I cannot hide. Neither can I deny our own hand as African Americans in this new dispensation of human enslavement that daily impales the Black psyche and soul with wincing pain. It threatens to drive me insane.

This is my inescapable burden that assaults me upon awakening. That arrives each day as inevitably as the song of morning birds outside my bedroom window. I am slave to this reality that weighs heavily upon me and elevates my blood pressure, gnaws at my mind and soul, with unrelenting stress that I am sure will someday prove fatal.

I awoke this morning to Independence Day, as a middle-class American in possession of my slice of the American dream. And yet, I wrestle with the truth that nearly 250 years since 13 American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain, this American life for Black folk still bears semblances of slavery.

The equally inescapable truth, however, is that if we remain in some ways enslaved, then it is slavery of a different kind. Slavery of the mind.

Indeed I see shackles all around me here in Bigger Thomas’ town, where NASCAR recently took center stage, its makeshift city track snaking across Jean-Baptiste Pointe Du Sable Lake Shore Drive. Not the dehumanizing wrought iron shackles that once held my African-American ancestors in chattel slavery. But invisible chains.

Socioeconomic chains and translucent barriers here on the South and West Sides of Chicago, where I grew up. The kinds that consign far too many Black children to a life of poverty saturated with fatalism, with assorted pathologies and societal abandonment, leaving them gasping in a hopeless sea.

It is slavery of a different kind: more insidious, more pervasive in some ways, more hideous. More difficult to break, to escape. Slavery of the mind. Chains created and assigned by the slave master, and adapted and baked over time into systemically racist policies. Chains inflicted upon us even by us.

On the recent weekend of Juneteenth, which coincided with Father’s Day, I was shaken by the headlines: more than 70 people shot, in Chicago alone, at least 13 fatally; a mass shooting in southwest suburban Willowbrook, Illinois, on Sunday, June 18, at a Juneteenth celebration in which 23 were reportedly shot and one killed.

I am unsettled by the news that through July 2, 1,188 people have been shot in Chicago (compared to 1,277) by the same time in 2022, according to Chicago Police. There have been 303 murders in Chicago (compared to 329) by this time in 2022.

The slight decrease in both areas is hardly a sign that it is any safer for Black lives in Chicago—where in 2022, according to Chicago police, 695 people were murdered and 2,832 were shot, most of them Black and male. It is, for me, only more proof of the impediments to the basic freedom as a Black man just to live.

And it matters not to me whether the finger wrapped around the trigger in the cases of African Americans shot or slain in Chicago or across America is Black or Blue. As a former big-city crime reporter, I know that historically and currently most often that finger is Black.

And I find this cause enough alone on the Fourth of July to mourn rather than celebrate.

More Moved To Cry Than Celebrate

As my friends attend assorted barbecues and parades today, I sit pecking on my computer, compelled by the angst over this great American holiday this year. In the past, I have flown my American flag above my house, and donned my star-spangled banner shirt that is the color brown. I thought about hoisting the flag that was once draped over the casket of my grandfather, a U.S. Navy veteran who died in 2018 at age 97. But I decided to leave Grandpa’s folded and sealed in its transparent plastic cover… Maybe next year.

On this Fourth, I am filled with mixed emotions as America’s great promises, moreover, her reneging on those promises, has perhaps never seemed more flagrant to me. More than the “freedoms” I possess, I am reminded of my unenviable status as a 21st century Post-Emancipation, Post-13th Amendment Black American slave.

I am unsettled by the cold winds now blowing colder across my country ‘tis of thee. By the inalterable historical truth that America was not originally founded for me but upon me—upon the backs and blood of my Black ancestors and upon hypocrisy. That 247 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, freedom for Black folks in America and the dream remain elusive amid perpetual policies and schemes of racial hate and degradation.

I cannot shake from my mind the truth that among the signers of that great Declaration and also of the Constitution of the United States of America were slave owners with plantations. Or that President Abraham Lincoln was not some redemptive father emancipator who inked the Emancipation Proclamation out of probity, honor, love or humanity but—by his own words—out of a commitment to save the nation. Not Black bodies or souls. Not us. Them.

“If I could save the union without freeing any slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”

The truth about the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Lincoln on Jan. 1, 1863, is that it did not free all slaves, only those slaves living within states not under Union control. It was the 13th Amendment—approved by Lincoln in February 1865, and ratified on Dec. 6, 1865, nearly three years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and eight months after Lincoln’s assassination—that abolished slavery in America.

For years, African Americans who found no joy or purpose in the Fourth of July as a so-called day of national liberation chose to celebrate Juneteenth, which began in Galveston, Texas. It marked the date in 1865 when Union General Gordon Granger and his troops arrived in Galveston and delivered General Order No. 3, announcing on June 19, the end of legalized slavery in Texas under the Emancipation Proclamation issued more than two years earlier. Hence the origin and tradition of celebrating Juneteenth.

Juneteenth became a national holiday when President Joe Biden signed S. 475 into law on June 17, 2021—a dream come true for Opal Lee, an activist and retired teacher who fought to make the celebration a federally-recognized holiday.

But the celebration of Juneteenth for Black folk outside of Texas has always puzzled me, mostly because a celebration of the passage of the 13th amendment seemed more historically accurate and more aligned with truth that would help debunk the mythology of Abraham Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.

I cannot count the times this Juneteenth that I heard people—Black and white—even journalists, say that the holiday marked the end of slavery and freedom for Black folk. It did not. But neither did the Fourth of July.

Amid Trumpism, a rising attack on the teaching of Black history, and America’s widening racial divide and racial tensions, I see more cause to cringe than to celebrate. More cause to mourn amid a burgeoning wealth gap, stubborn socioeconomic disparity between Blacks and whites, and stark inequities in healthcare and also education in which some public schools, like Chicago’s, remain weapons of mass destruction.

I see the mass incarceration of Black folk, widescale efforts to disenfranchise Black voters, and the systemic racism and hate that remain at the core of the conspicuous divide between the races in America. And I see more cause to leave my flag holder empty this Fourth than to see it fluttering in the wind, mocking me as a symbol of promises unkept.

Not Until My Soul Sleeps With My Ancestors

“Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.” –Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dream Speech, Aug. 28, 1963

Almost exactly 60 years after Dr. King gave in his “Dream” speech during the March on Washington, it remains as clear as the color of water that the Negro still is not free. That the chains remain.

I find this truth especially stinging on the Fourth of July—a day that my country revels in the freedom established by the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. A day when I am also keenly conscious of the truth that it wasn’t until 89 years later that my country abolished the slavery that disenfranchised and held my people as human chattel for nearly 250 years.

Am I freer than my ancestors? Sure, in some ways.

I am free to seek an education, though across America public schools remain separate and unequal. Free to own property, though economic redlining and racial segregation still cap my options. Free to vote, though gerrymandering and new ploys to disenfranchise Black voters persist.

I am free to bear arms, free to stay here in America, and free to leave. But having been around the world, including thrice to Africa, most recently as a 2021-22 Fulbright scholar to Ghana, I have come to the conclusion that there is nowhere to go where the American Black man can be truly embraced and free. Not even Africa.

I mentioned to someone upon my contemplation of writing this essay that I am not free. A Black woman, she said she was free: “free in Jesus.” A Christian, I too have tasted the liberty of Christ and of the transcendent empowerment of the Holy Ghost. But for as long as I dwell in this Black body, on this green earth, in this white America, I suspect I may never be free. Not until my tired Black soul sleeps with my ancestors, is eternally rested, and finally free.

Until that day, like Dr. King, I “refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.” I too have a dream. I long to someday be fully and finally free here as a citizen of these United States.

White free. American free. Free indeed. Free at last. Email: [email protected]