July 4

I love my country with a depth that has fostered a career spent teaching about its history and politics.  I am a patriot who named her only child after the man whose words we celebrate on this 4th of July day.  

But I am no “Love my country right or wrong” patriot.  I am an “I love my country enough to right the wrongs” patriot.  This year, a year determined to teach us some very important lessons, it seems appropriate to pause and think again abut the patriot I am.

I’ve taught it so much that I know the preamble to the Declaration of Independence by heart.  I read it several times a year; I think about it often.  I teach the Declaration in terms of that preamble and I never fail to be stirred by the claim that all men are created equal and endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  I think of the power of such a claim when it was made in 1776 and as we try to live by it now.  I teach my students that every right Americans subsequently demanded to have recognized, be it the right to be free from slavery, to vote, to marry whomever we please, was recognized in those words and was there all along.  

That’s not all that I teach because I know how often we fell short of that stirring claim; I know how often we still fall short of it.  I teach my students about both of those truths.  I teach Frederick Douglass’s words about the 4th of July.  I teach them about the racism baked into our founding and built into our firmament.

Then I remind them that we must be patriots who seek a better nation for all of us.  I remind them that all we need do is return to the words of the Declaration and let that truth guide our way.  

Juneteenth

I vividly remember the history class where I first learned about Juneteenth.  I was an undergraduate at UCLA - so it was the late ‘80s - and there was a passing reference to June 19 Black community celebrations in Texas in a collection of essays about the end of slavery.  I read them for a post-Civil War/Reconstruction American history class and the reference caught my attention.

I recall thinking that I had never heard of it before; that the professor in the history class never mentioned it himself.  At the time, I was a Californian through and through and that Southern history seemed distant from the world in which I lived.

Within a few years, I had moved to Nashville and Southern and Civil War history was everywhere I looked.  The more I explored the locations of historical events; the more I read the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the more Juneteenth stood out in my mind, as both an idea and a celebration.  It stood out as a cultural reflection of the history I was thinking about and sought to understand and it also stood out for its absence in the world of mainstream American culture.

In the last few years, Juneteenth has attracted more attention.  This year, in the explosion of real and, it seems, enduring interest in taking on the challenges of repairing the years of systemic inequality that is modern America, Juneteenth is at the center of our current dialogue.  If we want to make real the pledge that Black lives matter, and I certainly do, it’s long overdue that we think about our national history in terms of what’s been neglected, marginalized, or just plain left out.

For my Civics and Citizenship 8th grade class, summer reading will include a reflection on Juneteenth (this one, by Annette Garden Reed, which is both personal and historically rich), and some more readings around the idea of what history gets monuments, what gets ignored, and what that difference tells us about our national identity.

At minimum, my 8th graders will know and understand Juneteenth well before the age when I first knew of it.  At maximum, well, when you know that truth of your nations’s history, then you know the challenges that lie before you.  You learn what kind of citizen you would like to become.  That’s why 8th graders need to know our history.  And knowing about Juneteenth seems like a very good place to start.

On Good Trouble

To celebrate the life, leadership, and accomplishments of Reverend Martin Luther King in the same week that we will inaugurate a man singularly unqualified to lead our nation and who did not win the popular vote is one sort of irony.  That Mr. Trump has chosen this week to strike up a conflict with Representative John Lewis, a member of Congress and a Civil Rights leader who worked with Reverend King and has the scars to prove it, completes this circle of irony.

Representative Lewis, now 77 years old, remains active in defense of equality, liberty, and justice.  It is the struggle that has shaped his life.  When he speaks of his work in the civil rights movement, he contextualizes it by calling it “good trouble.”  In celebration of the accomplishments of Martin Luther King and his movement, in support of Representative John Lewis, and in resistance to Mr. Trump, let’s remember not to duck from “good trouble” when it comes our way.  Now is the time to do the right thing.