“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” asked Frederick Douglass, the former slave turned abolitionist leader, shortly before the Civil War.
Speaking for slaves across America, Douglass lambasted the “gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” Yet he refused to attack America itself, instead praising the Declaration of Independence and its “saving principles.” He called on his compatriots to “be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.” Douglass lived as he taught, playing a leading role in delivering his nation and his people to a new birth of freedom.
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Today, we might adapt Douglass’s question to a different context: What, to the black student, is the Fourth of July?
Two hundred and fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the black student is one of the most downtrodden and disempowered citizens in America. Education is the first rung of the ladder of opportunity, yet that rung has been sawed off for the vast majority of black boys and girls. The latest federal data show that barely 17 percent of black fourth-graders are proficient in reading—a number that hasn’t changed by 12th grade. In math, only 9 percent of black eighth-graders are proficient. Students of no other race fare so poorly. It’s a towering barrier to black participation and success in American society.
The black student has good reason to be angry. So do black parents, like those who attend my Pennsylvania church. My state’s education system is infamous for failing black students. In Philadelphia, public schools are heartbreaking places of untapped potential. Parents are left in tears as the school system spends nearly $43,000 per student yet can teach only a handful of students reading and arithmetic. In some Philly schools, not a single student is proficient in math. But this is not only a Pennsylvania problem—it is a national crisis.
Douglass said that “education . . . means emancipation,” and he would surely consider the failure of education a “gross injustice and cruelty to which” the black student “is the constant victim.” Obviously, the injustice of slavery was far more evil and inhumane, but the injustice of abysmal education is still deeply serious and demands action. Douglass would also say that the path to justice begins by fully and faithfully applying the principles of the Declaration. Black students and their families need real liberty—the liberty that’s essential to the pursuit of happiness. The Fourth of July is a painful yet powerful reminder of the urgent need for school choice.
Educational freedom is the civil rights issue of the twenty-first century, just as the original civil rights movement was the twentieth-century incarnation of nineteenth-century abolitionism. If the black student is ever going to get an equal shot at the American Dream, the black family deserves the freedom to choose the school that’s best for their children—whether public, private, religious, or home. Without this freedom, the black student is often doomed to life as a second-class citizen. This is not what black boys and girls were promised. This is not at all consistent with the ideals of the Declaration.
Thankfully, 18 states now have universal school choice, but America’s promise is unfulfilled in education in the other 32. Nearly a dozen studies have found that school choice improves test scores for children who go to private schools. And the research even more clearly demonstrates that school choice improves outcomes for public school students. Their schools need to up their game.
Black families know that they and their children deserve better—as do families of all races. Polls show that support for educational freedom is strongest among black Americans, running often as high as 90 percent, but other demographics support school by choice by large margins, too. If black families aren’t empowered to lift up their kids through real learning, the seeds of bitterness, resentment, and victimhood will only grow.
Frederick Douglass recognized the danger in his time—that the injustice of slavery would turn black people against the self-evidently true and just principles of America. In our time, the danger is that black families come to believe their kids have no opportunity to rise and thrive in America. The result would be grief, division, and violence instead of the hope, unity, and progress that ought to define a country built on such beautiful and universal ideals.
What to the black student is the Fourth of July? It is a time to remember and rally around what Frederick Douglass called the “saving principles” of the Declaration of Independence. And it is long past time to “be true to them” in the crucial realm of education, where we desperately need a new birth of freedom.