Reverend Barber Asks: What Does the Fourth of July Mean to the Immigrant and People of Color? [View all]
By late morning on July 4, news of President Trump’s plans to headline the nation’s 243rd birthday celebration at the Lincoln Memorial with tanks, flyovers, and fireworks barely rated a mention among major news outlets, which focused on an earthquake that rocked California.
It’s quite likely, though, that millions of Trump’s supporters—and certainly his communications team, terrified of the kinds of pitiful crowds Trump drew to his inauguration—were praying that the skies wouldn’t burst open with thunderstorms when he stepped to the podium. But in the spirit of Malcolm X, who asserted that whenever the slave master's house caught fire, the field negro prayed for a breeze, millions more Americans were also praying for torrential downpours.
It was in this context of division and animosity that the Reverend William J. Barber II, founder of the Moral Monday marches and the Poor People’s Campaign, delivered a searing sermon on the eve of the nation’s holiday at the Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in downtown Raleigh.
Barber, a hulking man draped in red robes and a white clerical collar, had a momentous task as he ambled down the church aisle of the nearly full church. His sermon promised to revisit one of the great speeches in American history, delivered by the abolitionist, runaway slave Frederick Douglass on July 5, 1852, on behalf of the Ladies Anti-Slavery Society at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, where he pointedly asked, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
Read more: https://indyweek.com/news/northcarolina/reverend-barber-fourth-of-july-immigrant-people-of-color/
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