Last Saturday, on the hottest Independence Day ever recorded in D.C., hundreds of masked men paraded around the U.S. Capitol while chanting, “Reclaim America!”
Members of the white-supremacist group Patriot Front arrived carrying Confederate and upside-down American flags. Pictures of the spectacle soon flooded social media documenting their appearance, their march and their exit, including one arresting image captured inside a packed Metro subway car. In it, a sea of men in khaki hats, blue shirts and white neck gaiters pulled over their faces filled the aisle and every seat but two. At the center of the frame, one seat was empty; the other was occupied by a young Black woman, perfectly alone.
The photo went viral almost instantly, evoking imagery from the civil rights era on the day the country marked its 250th anniversary. Above ground, there were celebrations of American exceptionalism; beneath the surface, though, there was evidence of a country regressing — or one that hasn’t changed as much as it thought. The reactions to the photo were plentiful, mostly in opposition to the group’s views and in agreement that the racial politics in the scene is a “defining image” of the United States today. “What they stand for is nothing that I could possibly agree with,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum replied when asked about the picture and the protest. “But one of the foundational principles of the United States, which makes democracy messy, is free speech.”
He’s not wrong. The Constitution is designed to manage domestic conflict, not to sidestep or suppress it. The rights it confers are available to the Patriot Front, despite its manifesto declaring that “democracy has failed this once great nation.” As a result, these foot soldiers marching for a white ethnostate exploit the very constitutional democracy they oppose and would deny to others based on race or ancestry alone. They capitalize on the protection provided by the letter of the law with hopes of undermining its spirit.
The Declaration of Independence receives the same treatment. The group anchors its claim to legitimacy in the founding document’s opening lines, which declare that a people may “dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.” In this way, it fancies itself the rightful heir to both the revolutionary Spirit of ’76 and Confederate traditions. But it ignores the sentence that follows: the one stating that all people are created equal, that they have rights that cannot be taken and that the consent of the governed is the rightful source of state power. It’s the same sentence that makes the young Black woman’s claim to the Declaration as legitimate as theirs and perhaps more earned.
Her presence on the train and stillness in her seat drew immediate comparisons to iconic images of Black Americans confronting injustice — most often to Rosa Parks, whose strategic refusal to budge from her seat on a segregated bus sparked a movement. It also recalls Ieshia Evans, the nurse and mother photographed standing alone in a flowing sundress as police in riot gear rushed in to arrest her during a Black Lives Matter demonstration in front of the Baton Rouge police department. But Parks and Evans were protesting; this woman was simply commuting. It took decades of protests and bloodshed for her to be secure in her seat, the product of a nation made more equal by the letter of the law. And yet, the photo is a visual representation of how it feels to live alongside racism in essence — even when minding your business, even at the nation’s semiquincentennial.
The challenge since the founding has been to close the gap between the letter of the law and its spirit. It’s especially messy in a democracy, where a law’s meaning is often debated and decided and revisited, even on issues considered long settled. The 250th anniversary spotlights the many people and places that painstakingly brought the text of the founding documents into closer alignment with its professed ideals. The Patriot Front’s protest was based on a desire to reclaim an antiquated vision of America, one that would sanction the inferiority of the young Black woman on the Metro. At the semiquincentennial, though, with all eyes on the nation’s capital, the truest heirs to the American promise are more likely to be the ones in the spotlight, not the ones hiding their identities.
The march ended without incident. Its safety was ensured by D.C. police, nearly three-quarters of whom are Black, Hispanic or Asian. The National Mall is home to memorials and museums chronicling the many contributions of people of all races and ethnicities who helped the country endure and evolve. That day, it was packed with people from all over who vote, pray and protest differently. Some Americans view this scene as evidence that the letter of the Declaration has grown closer to its spirit — progress worth commemorating on its milestone anniversary. But others paraded Confederate flags through it instead, too ashamed to show their faces.
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