Independence Day - A Black Man's Perspective...As History Relates Poem by James B. Earley

July....Seventeen Seventy-Six
Jubilant...folks....celebrating
....Every Fourth of July..since...
Across this land..commemorating

Freedom seized in circumstance dire
...From oppression's ominous threat
Yet.....chose to cast life's similar yoke
...Where its own soul indeed once sat

Annihilation.......centuries bondage...
The only life Indians and Negroes knew
...Picnics....fireworks......celebrations..
BLASPHEMY....ancestral's point of view

....Again...we gather at pioused ceremony
Oppression...burdensome...as it was then
Independence for some...but not for others
...America....celebrating.....despicable sin


Author's Note:
'What, to the American slave, is your Fourth 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. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.'
― Frederick Douglass