By Lee A. Daniels

This is the first of a two-part consideration of the meaning of the Fourth of July 2009. The second part will appear next Thursday

In a few days, America will turn again to its most treasured moment of spiritual refreshment—the celebration of the Fourth of July, literally the birth-day of the United States.

One can say with great certainty that black Americans and other Americans who hold progressive views will feel this Fourth of July is especially worthy of celebration. After all, “a black American of mixed heritage,” as Barack Obama describes himself, is President of the United States, called by the electorate to lead the nation out of a deeply complex, even dire predicament. For many, the meaning of his election victory and inaugural festivities—a sense of patriotism redeemed—has not faded.

But we should also not forget that this Fourth of July finds America still on a war footing—with a new Administration trying to, on the one hand, extricate the nation from a war in one country, Iraq, the previous Administration’s folly plunged into a murderous chaos; and, on the other, trying, justifiably, to destroy in Afghanistan the chief purveyor of global terrorism.

In both instances, the cost in lives of these wars—American, Iraqi, and Afghan citizens—has been wrenching.

Juxtaposing these two circumstances on this July 4th ought to inject  a special poignancy into our celebrations. Perhaps that will spur more of us to spend a few more moments than usual contemplating what freedom means and the sacrifice its purchase has always entailed.

That the Declaration of Independence was signed July 4, 1776 may be sufficient to make the month  historically resonant for most Americans.  But I’ve come to view July as a month full of powerful historical anniversaries of African Americans’ long march to freedom as well.

For example, this July 2 marks the forty-fifth anniversary of the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the most sweeping civil rights legislation enacted by Congress since the Reconstruction Era a century before.

In the famous photographs of President Lyndon Baines Johnson signing the Act in the East Room of the White House, one can almost feel the sense of the history of the occasion pervading the room. [In fact, July 2 is also the day the Continental Congress actually approved the resolution which led to the writing of the Declaration.]

In the photos taken at that moment, we scan the smiling faces of those present as the President distributes the signing pens to the Senators and Representatives who shepherded the legislation through Congress, and our eyes go to one other man, an outsider to the fraternity of politicians present.

That man was the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—the chief spokesman of the Civil Rights Movement, and the principal representative of the people whose struggle and sacrifice and indomitable will had brought that moment into being.

On a July day sixteen years earlier, another President, Harry S. Truman, had affixed his name to an important marker on the long road to black freedom. On July 26, 1948, Truman signed Executive Order 9981, which ended longstanding racist practices against African-American soldiers, fliers and sailors, practices that had divided and disgraced the American military until the end of World War Two.

Truman was responding not only to the moral imperative of history, he was also responding to the momentous new determination that coursed through black America in the wake of the Second World War.

Powered by the decades-long black migrations out of the South to the urban North and West, which had given them a measure of freedom and opportunity, and by their contributions to the American effort to “make the world safe for democracy,” African Americans understood they had once more proved their fitness for citizenship; and this time they would take their share of it.

So, in the immediate aftermath of the war came the challenges to official school segregation at the local level that led to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v Board of Education in 1954, welling up from ordinary black communities in South Carolina, Delaware and Kansas.

Those challenges were shepherded to the Court by the team of brilliant lawyers and activists of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, directed by Thurgood Marshall, who — you guessed it — was born in July (July 2, 1908)

July is also the birth-month of another figure who played a profound role in Black America’s post-World War Two freedom struggle: Medgar Evers, (born July 2, 1925), the charismatic NAACP activist in Mississippi whose 1963 slaying compelled John F. Kennedy to fully commit his Presidency to the cause of equal rights for blacks.

Of course, many also know that July’s specific importance to African-American history goes back even farther, to July 5, 1852.  On that day, Frederick Douglass, who had been born into slavery and escaped his bondage to become the nineteenth century’s most famous crusader for the rights of African Americans, spoke before the Rochester (New York) Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society.

Douglass’ speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” was both a paean to the ideals set forth in the Declaration and the Constitution, and a scathing indictment of white America’s failure to extend them across the color line.

Speaking at a time when slavery itself, not to mention the fiercest kind of racial discrimination, seemed a permanent fixture of American society, Douglass thundered, “Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present … America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.”

One hundred and twelve Julys would pass before it could be said that those words were no longer true.

I make no brief for displacing America’s official Black History Month—February—which was chosen in 1926 by the African-American scholar Carter G. Woodson because it was the birth-month of both Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (and, in fact, several other racially-significant events).

Indeed, July’s importance to African-American history underscores the fullness of the history of African Americans in and of itself. It also underscores how profoundly intertwined that history is — right down to the present moment — with the forces and ideals which led to and flowed from the actions of the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776.

Lee A. Daniels is Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline and Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.