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Dear Progressive Reader,

On July 5. 1852, Frederick Douglass, already a famous and much-requested orator, was asked to give a speech ([link removed]) at the Independence Day commemoration in Rochester, New York. The speech, known today as “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” drew a sharp contrast between the professed ideals of the Declaration of Independence, and the reality of slavery in America. (It would be another decade before President Abraham Lincoln would issue the Emancipation Proclamation, and another three years after that before slavery was actually abolished ([link removed]) through the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.) On that day in 1852, Douglass told ([link removed]) the crowd, “What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that
Declaration of Independence, extended to us? . . . I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us.”

Eighty-three years later, in 1935, Langston Hughes would put those thoughts into the poem “Let America Be America Again.” Hughes penned ([link removed]) , “There's never been equality for me, / Nor freedom in this ‘homeland of the free.’ ” But Hughes, in the poem, would expand the frame even further, noting a list of other groups left out. “I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, / I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars. / I am the red man driven from the land, / I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek— / And finding only the same old stupid plan / Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak,” he wrote.

Another twenty years later in his book Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin continued the arguments of Hughes, and of Douglass before him, explaining ([link removed]) : “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” Today, seventy years after Baldwin wrote those words, their call is more needed than ever. As Donald Trump continues his agenda of criminalizing immigrants, dismantling the social safety net, attacking universities and libraries—and so many more of the things we ought to be celebrating on this 249th anniversary of this nation’s founding document and its ideals of democracy—we must criticize this Administration and its actions. As Bill Lueders writes ([link removed]) in an op-ed this week posted on our website, and distributed nationwide, “We're living through
what will undoubtedly be remembered as one of the most shameful periods in U.S. history. Let's use the holiday to affirm our commitment to progress.”

Elsewhere on our website this week, Eleanor Bader speaks with ([link removed]) author Ira Wells about his new book On Book Banning; Owen Schalk describes ([link removed]) Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s capitulations to Trump; and Jeff Bryant explains ([link removed]) why rural communities need the “community schools” model more than ever. Plus, Medea Benjamin and Nicolas S.J. Davies report on ([link removed]) how the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency and its director general, Rafael Grossi, “became part of the U.S.-Israeli plan for war on Iran.” Also this week, I spoke on WORT radio ([link removed]) with
Annelle Sheline of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft about the history of U.S.-Iran relations and the information known so far about the U.S. bombing mission against Iran’s nuclear facilities which took place last month.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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