Don’t whitewash American history on the Fourth of July

As we prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of America’s independence on the Fourth of July, we have much to be proud of and love about our country. But we should acknowledge that our nation — like all nations — isn’t perfect and never has been.

Whitewashing American history to cover up the truth about slavery, racism and our country’s other flaws — as President Trump demanded in a 2025 executive order — prevents us from learning from our mistakes and doing better in the future.

One of the most powerful truth-telling speeches ever made about America was delivered on the 76th anniversary of our independence in 1852 by Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery at age 20 in 1838 and became a leading abolitionist.

“This Fourth July is yours, not mine,” Douglass said in his speech to the Rochester (N.Y.) Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. “You may rejoice, I must mourn. … What, to the American slave, is your 4th 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.”

Douglass told his audience that for the enslaved person on Independence Day, “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 denunciations 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, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of........

© The Hill