Sometimes in 101 we have assigned a personal essay about observing the 4th of July. Most of the students wrote about family celebrations with a few references to parades and community fireworks. There was a domestic, happy quality to these tales. That is the sort of event on the surface of the poem, "Immigrant Picnic," by Gregory Djanikian, though the poem also hints at the personal loses involved in even the least traumatic relocation.
The custom of public orations for the 4th seems to have fallen out of practice. Only at Holden Village have I experienced a public reading of the Declaration of Independence such I have read about in descriptions of historical and fictional Independence Day observations in the 19th and early 20th century. A powerful example, surely one of the great American speeches, is Frederick Douglass' "What to the American Negro is the Fourth of July?" He lauds the nation's ideals, honors its founders, and points directly at its failure to enact its best commitments. Here is James Earl Jones' reading the speech. VIDEO LINK
Even if slavery is outlawed, there is much in these words to inspire us decades later, to remind us that even as declaring independence was followed by a war to achieve it, so too proclaiming equality and freedom requires daily effort to make those ideals into reality.
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