This is a guest opinion column

During a landmark year of Civil Rights Movement anniversaries and in the middle of the celebrations of Juneteenth and American Independence, we are reminded of the words of Charles Dickens,’ “Tale of Two Cities.” It is seemingly “the best of times and the worst of times.”

This month, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the state of Alabama must undo a legacy of political racial gerrymandering and reapportion congressional district boundaries in a way that should increase representation of the Black community in Congress. Last month, we celebrated Juneteenth as a federal holiday for just the second time since it was approved by law in 2021. Juneteenth commemorates the 1865 “Freedom Day” when enslaved African people in Galveston, TX were notified that the Emancipation Proclamation had set them free more than two years earlier.

Nevertheless, over a decade before Juneteenth on the day following the celebration of American Independence Day in 1852, abolitionist Frederick Douglass posed a passionate question and then offered an answer that answered. Douglass spoke to a gathered assembly of white abolitionists in Rochester, NY and rhetorically asked, “What to the slave is your fourth of July?” His answer was resolute:

The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.

Some may argue that Juneteenth should lead us to wipe away the tears of our historical July 4th mourning. However, our new federal holiday (which many Black people are still learning about themselves), should teach us that whether enslaved Black people learned that they were legally emancipated in 1863 or 1865, we walked off plantations into what was soon considered to be the “worst of times” or the “nadir” of the Black experience in America. These low times were characterized by racial terrorism, institutional segregation, economic exploitation, and an entire new era of struggle. In the current climate, one might wonder what we are walking into today.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down affirmative action educational programs which consider race as a factor in challenging racial injustice. Expanding policies across the country designed to ban Black history books and critically erase the knowledge of our legacy of the Black freedom struggle, cast shadows amidst the ‘sunlight that has brought life and healing’ to others. These times seem to reflect the distance that remains between racial groups in America even today. We must seize the time today. We must preserve our historic structures, protect our authentic stories and our progress. In these worst of times, we must call upon our better and best to push back.

Over 150 years ago, free Black people walked off our plantations and marched forward to buy millions of acres of land. True believers built and sustained historic churches as centers of community life. Black entrepreneurs and cooperatives invested in and established independent businesses, settlements, and towns to meet the needs of our disenfranchised demographics. In the face of reactionary and racist backlash, our ancestors advanced a commitment to freedom and self-determination that we so desperately need in these present times. In the intersection of Juneteenth and the fourth of July, we must remember that Frederick Douglass also once said, “If there is no struggle. There is no progress.” Amidst the fireworks and flag waving of our holiday celebrations this week, ‘stoney the road’ we continue to tread.

Reverend Lukata Mjumbe is executive director of the Alabama African American Civil Rights Heritage Sites Consortium