[As the author of a book on the contested history of American patriotism, every day of 2025 feels strikingly relevant. So for this year’s July 4th series, I wanted to share & expand on excerpts from that book that feature models of critical patriotism from across our history, leading up to a weekend request for further conversations!]
On a fiery
work and voice that exemplify the “critical” in critical patriotism.
The book
excerpt: “In the same year that [William] Apess
published his autobiography, another young Bostonian firebrand launched his
own critical patriotic broadside against American myths and exclusions. David
Walker (1796–1830) was born in Wilmington, North Carolina to an enslaved
father (who died before his birth) and a free mother, making him legally free
but deeply tied to and affected by the system of slavery. As an adult he moved
to Charleston, South Carolina and then Philadelphia, joining the groundbreaking
African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in both cities, before settling in the
mid-1820s in Boston’s Beacon
Hill neighborhood, a haven for free African Americans. He became over the
next few years a leading voice, in that Bostonian community and throughout the
North, for abolitionism, civil rights, and the development of a thriving
commercial and social scene for the African American community, such as in his
role as a contributor to the nation’s first black-owned newspaper, Freedom’s
Journal. And in September 1829 he published a book, Walker’s
Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of
the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States
of America.
As that
long title indicates, Walker directly modeled his Appeal upon the
U.S. Constitution, beginning with a Preamble and moving through four Articles.
In many ways the book embodies the critical side of critical patriotism, laying
out the case for Walker’s opening assertion, offered to his “Dearly beloved
Brethren and Fellow Citizens,” that “we (colored people of the United States)
are the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since
the world began.” The Articles trace four root causes of that state, four
interconnected forms of oppression and exclusion that Walker demands that all
Americans face head on; he does so in a style that combines passion,
exemplified by his frequent capitalizations, italics, and exclamation points, with
nuanced logic and argumentation. But the very creation of his text, as well as
its direct parallels to the Constitution, embodies a critical patriotic
challenge to the nation’s celebratory and mythic ideals. And in his conclusion
Walker takes that work one step further, quoting at length the opening of the
Declaration of Independence and then exclaiming, “See your Declaration
Americans!!! Do you understand your own language?”
As those
brief quotations from Walker’s book illustrate, his is one of the most extreme (if,
as I hope would go without saying, entirely justified and righteous) voices I
include in the book and in my category of critical patriotism. While the
critical patriotism of a contemporary and fellow firebrand like William
Apess leaned a bit more into unity and love, that is (not surprisingly
given Apess’s work as a
traveling Christian minister), David Walker’s variety most definitely
emphasized the “critical.” Such voices and perspectives can be harder for
audiences to hear, especially our frustratingly fragile white American audiences
(then and now), leading all too easily to dismissals of “angry
Black men” and the like. But an important goal of my book’s tracing of the
history of critical patriotism is to push us past such knee-jerk reactions and
toward a collective conversation about what these voices can help us to see and
engage in our shared histories—and if we can’t hear hard truths about our
nation, past and present, then we can’t say we truly love it either.
Next
patriotic model tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Models of patriotism you’d share?
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