Democratic View: What does the Fourth of July mean to this democrat?

I love Independence Day. When I was a kid, the Fourth promised an unlimited supply of hotdogs, potato chips and Coke, guzzled down while watching fireworks. After I moved to Tompkins County, the holiday became synonymous with long, lazy parties at a friend’s Cayuga Lake house.

As I grew more knowledgeable, Independence Day became more than an occasion for a summer party. I visited Boston’s Bunker Hill, the US Constitution and Lexington and Concord. As I learned about their sacrifices, the folks who fought for Independence earned my respect. The Revolutionary War was long, violent and bloody. Around 400,000 colonists remained loyal to Great Britain; Americans fought Americans. Of the estimated 217,000 Americans who served in the war, 25,324 perished, a staggering death toll.

The hypocrisy inherent in the Declaration especially troubled me. Its author, Thomas Jefferson, owned slaves. His interpretation of the right to liberty, freedom and the pursuit of happiness excluded all but white men. In 1798, thirteen years after Independence, our Constitution enshrined these inequities. One great irony of American history is that Great Britain, our colonial oppressor, abolished slavery in its colonies in 1833, thirty years before the United States.

Heroic Americans who demanded a more perfect Union became models for me. Tompkins County is in the Finger Lakes, the center of much of their 19th century efforts. Founding Mothers met at Seneca Falls in July 1848 where they and male dignitaries like Frederick Douglass hammered out the Declaration of Sentiments. America’s Moses, Harriet Tubman, made her home in Auburn. There, her dear friend, Francis Adeline Seward, opened her mansion as a safehouse for African Americans fleeing bondage. Seward’s husband, William Steward, the abolitionist governor of New York, became one of the founding fathers of the Republican Party, established to halt the expansion of slavery. During the Civil War, African American soldiers mustered at Ithaca’s St. James AME Church to enlist in New York’s 26th Regiment US Colored Infantry.

I am ashamed that many in my Democratic Party opposed these movements to extend the benefits of liberty, well into the 20th century. After Reconstruction ended, southern Democrats established segregation and stripped Black Americans of voting rights. President Woodrow Wilson, a Virginian, allowed segregation in the Federal service just a few months after taking office. Because Franklin Roosevelt excluded domestic and agricultural workers from Social Security programs, 65 percent of the African American work force were ineligible to receive benefits until the 1950s.

The arc of justice moves slowly, but, for us Democrats, it did move. In1948, President Truman ended the shame of segregation in our Armed Forces. As majority leader, Lyndon Johnson engineered the passage of the first Civil Rights Act in 1957. As the Civil Rights movement strengthened in the 1960s, many Northerners became Democrats, while southern Democrats abandoned the party.

As president, Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Act, which forced Southern states to open voting to African Americans. Over the next decades, the Republican Party increasingly has dedicated itself to reversing access to the ballot and to curtailing other fundamental civil rights. The last three Republican presidents appointed six Supreme Court justices whose decisions have curtailed access to the ballot, stripped women of fundamental rights to medical care and privileged big business interests over worker rights. Most shocking, the last Republican president attempted to overthrow the 2020 election, attacking the very roots of our democracy.

This Independence Day, I will be thinking of the preciousness of our fragile Democracy. I mourn the fact that a profoundly undemocratic and authoritarian leader controls the once great Republican Party. Voters must recognize the great peril our nation faces over the next months as we move toward the November Election. I urge every voter to remember that democracy is on the ballot in all races this November. I trust all voters, whatever their political affiliation, will remember and honor the words of our greatest American president, the Republican Abraham Lincoln:

It is rather for us here dedicated to the great task remaining before us …

   That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and

   That government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not

Perish from the earth.

Ann Sullivan chairs the City of Ithaca Third Ward Democratic Committee.