This week, President Trump went on Twitter to ask his supporters to “HOLD THE DATE” for a celebration at the Lincoln Memorial on July 4 “called a Salute to America.” The gathering, as he explained, will include “a major fireworks display, entertainment, and an address by your favorite President, me!”
Many mainstream commentators lambasted the president for his predictable bombast. “Trump’s July 4th celebration sounds like a salute to Trump,” read a typical headline. Such commentary, however, deflects attention from a more ominous historical context. The Fourth of July has routinely been used by white nationalist and supremacist movements to consolidate power, recruit members, raise funds and draw ideological linkages between race and nation, whiteness and patriotism, and blackness and civic fraudulence.
Given the president’s well-publicized appeals to white nationalism, xenophobia and nativism — appeals heard in his refusal to condemn white supremacists in Charlottesville, his bald bigotry toward migrants and asylum seekers of color, his leading role in the “birther” movement and beyond — Trump’s planned Independence Day celebration must be viewed as part of this long lineage of white nationalist movements co-opting the language of independence and freedom on the Fourth of July to advance their causes.
Throughout the 19th century, the American Colonization Society (ACS), a popular transregional organization that advocated for removing “free” black people from the United States and resettling them in Liberia, used the Fourth of July to expand its message and donor base. Founded in 1816-1817 in Washington, the ACS quickly became the leading institutional voice calling for the pursuit of a homogeneous white nation.
“Among us is a growing population of strangers,” preached pastor Baxter Dickenson to the ACS Auxiliary Society of Hampden County, Mass. on July 4, 1829. Dickenson expressed his reservation that free black people could ever be sufficiently incorporated into “this white nation.” To Dickenson, they couldn’t match up to white America: poor where white Americans thrived, ignorant where white Americans were “enlightened” and enslaved where white people were independent. To the pastor, the solution was obvious: “An asylum has been opened for them in the land of their fathers. Send them thither; and they will find themselves to be at home. … Rise to their relief. Restore them to their proper home.”
It should come as no surprise that black Americans nearly unanimously rejected the colonization movement and the type of cheap white atonement it represented and organized vigorously against it.