Falsehoods Of The Fourth Of July

Each Fourth of July is celebrated in the time-honored way -- fireworks, parades, cookouts and, oh yes, recommitment to the fine principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence: those "self-evident" truths and "unalienable" rights.

For starters, the day itself, July 4, isn't the day that America’s independence was declared by the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia. Even though you go inside of any library or museum in this country and see a picture of the founding Fathers standing around signing the Declaration of Independence…that is a Fraud! The Declaration of Independence, if you are to celebrate it, should be on August 2nd.

The physical document revered as the Declaration of Independence, a vellum scroll kept in the National Archives in Washington with 57 signatures proudly sitting at its foot, has no claim on being the unique founding document. It was hand-copied later. As to the signatures of those who pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor, they were added later still – and to make matters more confusing, some signatures were inscribed by new congressional delegates, men who hadn't even been in the room.

Not surprisingly, John Adams believed that July 2 would become the significant day in the new republic's calendar of celebration. That's because it was on July 2, 1776, that delegates from the 13 Colonies at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia in fact voted to proclaim independence from King George III and his ministers.

So if you think that Thomas Jefferson alone wrote the Declaration of Independence, or the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia was made to ring to announce independence, or that Betsy Ross sewed the first American flag at the request of George Washington, you are wrong, wrong and wrong. And if you never learned about George Washington’s own declaration, that’s another gap in historical knowledge if you had not read Black history before White history.