Freedom Built on Theft, Terror, and a White Family Business
Every July, this country puts on its Sunday best and calls it independence. Fireworks crack, flags wave, and the nation asks everyone to join the chorus: America, land of the free.
But underneath the pageantry is a different story: colonists who felt oppressed by taxes, while they stole land from Indigenous nations and forcibly drove out the Indigenous population through war, disease, and outright genocide, even as they stole labor, kin, and life from Africans. The so-called American Revolution is still sold as a freedom struggle against tyranny, but if we tell the truth, it looks less like a freedom struggle than a white family business dispute. Britain ran the original shop: empire, extraction, slavery, and land theft under one logo. The colonists did not dismantle that operation; they opened a competing shop down the road and fought to control the profits from human trafficking and stolen territory.
The lie is not only about the past. It is also about who gets named as freedom’s author in the present. That is why this argument matters for #teachtruth and for the educators who refuse to hand young people a patriotic bedtime story in place of history.
They Were NOT Revolutionaries
The men celebrated as patriots were not revolutionaries in the sense of overturning a system of oppression. They were rival shareholders in the same imperial enterprise. Their quarrel with Britain centered on who would set the rules for trade, taxes, westward expansion, and control over enslaved people and Indigenous land, not on ending those systems. Even the language of a “family quarrel” gets closer to the truth than all that freedom-talk ever will.
When they used the language of slavery to describe British policy, they were cosplaying as the enslaved while continuing to own, buy, and sell human beings. Their dispute was over management and margins, not morality. Fighting over who runs the trafficking routes does not make a liberation movement; it makes a reorganization of the business model.
Jefferson Knew The Lie
No figure captures this nasty and deathly contradiction more clearly than Thomas Jefferson, a man saturated in rabid racism and maniacal greed, all of it funded by a bloody plantation economy of stolen labor. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson admitted that he “tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just” because slaveholding America could not escape judgment forever.
He knew. He said he knew. But, he still chose to extract wealth and pleasure from Black bondage. Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people over his lifetime, freed very few, and fathered children with Sally Hemings, an enslaved teenager he owned and repeatedly raped, as was common practice among enslavers who treated Black girls and women as disposable property. The record on Jefferson’s relationship to slavery, the research on Sally Hemings and her children, and the long argument over his dark side all lead to the same place.
This was not a hidden private contradiction. Jefferson’s participation in slavery was public, structural, and normalized among human traffickers of his class. And the rationale people still use to excuse all of this—everybody did it—falls apart the second you remember that abolitionists existed in the same time frame. If everybody believed slavery was normal, there would have been no abolitionist movement, no antislavery petitions, no maroons, no rebellions, and no moral witness saying this is wrong. Some people chose evil with their eyes open, while others fought it in public.
Who Gets Named
The nation loves to raise up Crispus Attucks as evidence that Black people were present at the “founding” of America and in gleeful support. Attucks was a fugitive from slavery who died in the Boston Massacre, and his memory is often used to fold Black sacrifice into a patriotic narrative that leaves the structure of bondage untouched.
But for Black people in the revolutionary era, this was not a clean freedom struggle. It was a white kinfolk conflict, and we navigated the narrow openings for survival inside it the best we could. When British officials offered freedom to enslaved people who fled rebel masters and joined the Crown, many Africans chose that path, not because Britain was righteous, but because they were reading the immediate possibilities for life and escape more clearly than the mythology allows. The stories of Black Loyalists and Africans who fought their way to freedom show what that calculus looked like on the ground.
The same lie shows up in classrooms now. Students are taught to admire founders, quote documents, and celebrate symbols while being denied the fuller record of conquest, bondage, rebellion, and survival that made those symbols possible. That is why #teachtruth is not an optional slogan. It is a refusal to let mythology keep posing as civic education, and a defense of young people’s right to historical truth.
Before the Uniform
The record of African enlistment in the Revolutionary War only shows a fraction of the resistance that already existed. Long before any Black man put on a British or Continental uniform, enslaved Africans were already running, sabotaging, burning, poisoning, plotting, and fighting in ways that can only be understood as guerrilla war against slavery. The long history of slave resistance in Georgia makes that plain.
In the Lowcountry and coastal South, including Georgia, the Carolinas, and north Florida, maroon communities formed in swamps and remote terrain, sheltering fugitives who refused to return to bondage. Those maroon communities were not side notes. They were freedom ground, intelligence networks, and living refusals. And in Florida, Black Seminoles turned survival into a disciplined form of resistance that made slave catchers and soldiers pay a price.
So when British proclamations promised freedom to enslaved people who fled rebel masters and joined the Crown, thousands did so. They were not new recruits to struggle. They were experienced resisters plugging their fight into whatever structure offered weapons, cover, or a possible exit from bondage. Black enlistment should be read for what it often was: the formalized version of an older guerrilla tradition, not the beginning of Black resistance.
The same pattern showed up again in the Civil War. Lincoln’s 1862 letter to Horace Greeley made clear that his “paramount object” was saving the Union, not destroying slavery as a matter of justice. That matters because even the men later celebrated as emancipators were still trying to preserve a white republic first.
Lincoln also moved slowly on Black enlistment. He resisted military emancipation and arming Black people until the realities of war and Black resistance forced the issue. By the time the state finally formalized Black military service, Black people had already been driving the struggle from below through flight, labor refusal, intelligence gathering, and self-emancipation. The history of Black soldiers in the Civil War makes clear how much they changed the meaning of that war.
Black people transformed a white family war into a Black freedom struggle. Roughly 180,000 Black men served in the Union Army, but even that number should not make us forget the older truth: the uniform came late. The struggle did not.
White People’s Treason Is Rewarded
After the war, Black communities built schools, held office, purchased land, and defended themselves in the face of white terror. Reconstruction offered a brief opening for multiracial democracy, but that opening narrowed under federal retreat, organized white supremacist violence, and the reintegration of former Confederates into power. The history of Reconstruction’s collapse is an additional reminder that America will choose reunion with white violence over justice for Black people if nobody forces another choice.
That is why treason in defense of white supremacy so often appears rewarded in the United States. Confederate figures were not fully disgraced. Public schools and monuments continued to honor them generations later, with hundreds of schools documented as having borne Confederate names. That is not a side issue. It is a daily lesson in how this country treats the children of white supremacy—not as betrayers of the republic, but as forgiven kith and kin.
And slavery itself did not end as neatly in real life as the textbooks pretend. The work of Antoinette Harrell traces Black families in places like Louisiana and Mississippi who were still trapped in debt peonage and plantation bondage well into the 20th century, with some not reaching anything like freedom until the 1950s and 60s. So while the nation congratulated itself on progress, there were still Black people being worked, controlled, and terrorized under the same conditions of slavery, but addressed y by another name.
That same theft reached for Black children too. In 1965, Mississippi police violently grabbed the U.S. flag from five-year-old Anthony Quin as he protested for voting rights with his family. They snatched a Black child’s flag the way this country so often snatches Black children’s rights—violently, shamelessly, and always in the name of order. This exposes the same habit running through all of it: wrapping domination in law, patriotism, and procedure while crushing Black life underneath. The white state was not just afraid of Black adults with power, but of even a small Black child publicly claiming belonging and political voice.
A Living Tradition
What terrified the white state was never simply Black hope. It was Black people armed, organized, and clear that our freedom would not depend solely on white mercy. During the Civil War, Black soldiers in uniform challenged the racial order directly. Later, that same fear reappeared whenever Black communities embraced armed self-defense beyond white supervision.
Robert F. Williams’ Negroes With Guns gave one name to this tradition. In Monroe, North Carolina, Black people organized to defend themselves against racist terror when the state would not protect them. Williams did not invent the practice. He named something our people had been doing for generations.
That history lives in my family as much as in any archive. In my maternal line, the Johnsons of Dover, Georgia carry their own chapter in this tradition. My grandmother’s uncles got into a fight with some white men—and they won. Later, those men gathered in a bar, getting drunk and talking about going after the Johnson boys, until one of them sobered up enough to tell the truth: “I don’t know… them Johnson boys got a lotta guns.”
That kind of moment is in the same lineage as maroons in the swamp, Black troops in Union blue, Reconstruction patrols, and Monroe’s organized self-defense. A lot of our history never made the textbooks, but it kept us alive. And that is exactly why great educators matter: they help young people recognize survival, resistance, and political clarity as history rather than as footnotes.
What Leadership Requires
A truthful July 4th reflection cannot stop at critique. It has to ask what leadership demands in a country where the founding ideals were articulated alongside genocide, enslavement, and the persecution of those who stood for justice.
Servant leadership here means refusing comforting myths and choosing responsibility anyway. It means telling young people the truth about Jefferson and Lincoln, naming the white family business for what it was, and honoring the long tradition of Black survival, organizing, and self-defense without apology. It also means defending the teachers, librarians, scholars, and cultural workers who keep telling that truth when lawmakers, school boards, and patriotic censors want it buried.
If you’re going to be a product of history, be a product of abolitionist history. Stop making excuses. Everybody is “of their time,” but they still have to choose which lineage they claim. As Grammy-nominated poet, Amir Sulaiman, reminds us, “we’re all going to be somebody’s ancestors one day. Act accordingly.”
That action has to be concrete.
- Uplift #teachtruth not as a slogan, but as a defense of young people against patriotic disinformation.
- Protect educators who teach the founding as conquest, slavery, and contested freedom rather than national innocence.
- Support renaming and public truth-telling that refuses to honor traitors, Confederates, and enslavers on public land or in public schools.
- Engage young people in conversations around What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? and The Ballot or the Bullet.
- Invest in institutions that build real safety, political education, historical literacy, and community accountability.
- Center for Black Educator Development (CBED) — Rebuilding the national Black teacher pipeline through recruitment, training, and culturally affirming professional development for educators of color.
- Assata’s Daughters — A Black women-led, intergenerational organization in Chicago that organizes and trains young people in the radical Black liberation tradition.
- Black Organizing Project (BOP) — An Oakland-based, member-led organization building Black community power to end the criminalization and over-policing of Black youth and families.
- Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) — A Bay Area grassroots organization fighting for the racial and economic justice, dignity, and liberation of Arab and Muslim communities at home and abroad.
- Equity and Transformation (EAT) — A Chicago organization founded by and for formerly incarcerated people, building social and economic equity for Black workers in the informal economy.
Maybe we can talk about celebration when this country starts engaging in what Malcolm X called progress—not just pulling the knife out of our backs, but healing the wound it made. Right now they still argue about whether there was ever a knife at all. #Teachtruth exists because great educators refuse that lie, and because young people deserve a history sturdy enough to tell them not just what this country claimed to be, but what it did, who resisted, and what responsibility that leaves with them now.
