FOUNDERS' PROMISE UNFULFILLED

I am skipping the smoky barbecues and red, white and blue parades today. No
booming fireworks or eager flag waving for me, either.

You see, I'm having trouble trying to celebrate something I haven't fully
known -- freedom and equality.

America's promise of real democracy remains unfulfilled, and nearly 40
years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s prophetic "I Have a Dream"
speech, many black Americans still "languish in the corners of American
society . . . exiles in their own land."

Today, black unemployment is more than twice that of white Americans. When
black men do have jobs, they can only expect to earn about 85 percent of
the salary of white men -- even with comparable education and job experience.

Black youths face tremendous obstacles in the pursuit of a quality
education. Wide gaps in test scores reflect the inequity in their inferior
schools.

For many, segregation is still the rule: The average white person in
big-city America lives in a neighborhood that is 83 percent white, while
the typical black person in the big city lives in a neighborhood that is 54
percent black.

Cross burnings -- another vestige of the past -- have also endured: they
average about one a week somewhere in America, says the Southern Poverty
Law Center, which tracks hate crimes.

While squashing unrest with forceful water hoses and vicious dogs has
fallen from standard police procedure, cops today have turned to an equally
insidious form of containment: racial profiling.

Faced with such stubborn, enduring issues over who gets full rights and
privileges of citizenship, what's to celebrate? Every day we practice
things that contradict the principles of freedom and democracy.

If nothing else, Independence Day should serve as a damning reminder of
America's deep fault lines. A day that should challenge us to re-examine
the existing order and rise to confront it.

Frederick Douglass, one of the foremost leaders of the abolitionist
movement, once asked, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" The
question, answered in a poignant speech delivered in 1852, rings true today
for many blacks nearly 150 years later.

"The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common.
The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence,
bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me," Douglass said.
"America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds
herself to be false to the future."

Sure, black America is better off now than it was a century and a half ago
when Douglass spoke. But as I look over the landscape today, I still see a
nation marching -- out of step -- in the wrong direction.