By Shawnee Calhoun
In the United States, Independence Day reflects the ongoing duality of our country. The promise of life, but without the individual right to bodily autonomy nor the security to express joy and community without opposition. The promise of freedom from the British Crown, but not from internal oppression and systemic racism. The promise of the right to pursue happiness, but without the fair economic, housing or agricultural practices to guarantee equal opportunity to access it to its fullest potential.
The day itself is supposed to commemorate those ideals as well as the lives of the men and women who sacrificed, in effort and in mortality, to ensure U.S. citizens would have unhindered access to the benefits of those unalienable rights. The latter gets lost under the heat of barbecues, the flash of fireworks, and the joy of line dances at the reunions and festivals. Beyond those distractions, the stories of unsung heroes in the fight for human rights in the United States get buried underneath the narratives of the founding fathers of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.
This year, their stories are being provided with a space to live on perpetually and be woven into the national fabric similar to the way Kwanzaa and Juneteenth are today. Martyrs Day, the brainchild of author and legal historian Gloria J. Browne-Marshall, celebrates the lives of the people whose efforts and lives advanced the movement for human rights equality in the United States. The movement will observe its inaugural national commemoration this Sunday, July 5 — one day after the nation marks 250 years of independence.
The idea was born on the road. Browne-Marshall, a professor of constitutional law and Africana studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, spent the past year touring the country behind her latest book, “A Protest History of the United States” (Beacon Press), which chronicles half a millennium of American dissent, opening with the Indigenous nations who stood against colonization and running through the marches of our own moment. In city after city — Memphis, Nashville, Little Rock, Sarasota, Los Angeles — she met readers asking the same questions: about protest, about protesters, and about what they could do in their own hometowns.
After meeting hundreds of them, she turned the question inward. “I would ask them, will you ask yourself what you can do?” Browne-Marshall said in an interview with the Tri-State Defender. “And when I asked that question, I prayed on that question.” What moved her was the idea of “a tribute to slain activists and protesters” — Americans whose lives, she said, “were taken just like they were in battle.”
“We have days to commemorate and pay tribute and honor those people who fought for this country in foreign land,” she said. “What about those people on their own homeland who fought for civil rights and social justice and voting rights and equality?”
A trusted elder told her when that day should fall: “It should be on July 5th,” the elder said, “because of Frederick Douglass’s speech.” On July 5, 1852, Douglass stood before the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society at Corinthian Hall and delivered “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” — speaking the day after the nation’s celebration rather than on it, while millions remained enslaved. “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine,” Douglass told his audience. “You may rejoice, I must mourn.”
One hundred seventy-four years later, Martyrs Day restores his rhythm to the calendar. “We celebrate on the 4th of July and have the fireworks,” Browne-Marshall said, “but we should also have a day right after that in which we ask ourselves, ‘What was the price of this freedom for regular people?’”
Browne-Marshall is intent that the new observance is an addition to, not a rival holiday. “July 5th is not in competition with the Fourth of July,” she said. “It is a reflection on the freedoms that one celebrates on the Fourth of July.” Independence Day, she noted, was once also known as Freedom Day. The fifth of July exists because, in her words, “the work of freedom is ongoing work.” “The words in the U.S. Constitution are words on paper,” she said. “To make them a reality, it took human beings — activists, protesters, regular folks who put their hands in and decided they were going to push forward a better community and a better country.” Or, as she put it more plainly: “Freedom didn’t fall out of the sky. Santa Claus didn’t give it to us.”
Those who paid include names the country knows — Emmett Till, George Floyd — and names it should. Vernon Dahmer, a Mississippi voting rights leader whose motto was “if you don’t vote, you don’t count,” died in 1966 from burns suffered when his home was firebombed. Five Black men were gunned down in Philadelphia in 1871 for attempting to exercise the right to vote they had held for barely a year — not in the Deep South, but in the city where the Declaration was signed. Such martyrs, Browne-Marshall said, were “right here inside the United States of America, trying to get what is in our Constitution applied in reality and day-to-day life for themselves, their families, their community, and other people in the country.” Their biographies, along with educational toolkits and draft proclamations for local officials, are available at martyrsday.us.
Since Browne-Marshall first shared the vision in the fall of 2025, the movement has gathered proclamations from the governor of Maryland and the cities of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Canton, Ohio, and Longmont, Colorado, with more than a dozen inaugural events scheduled from San Francisco to New York City, where the national commemoration will be held. Memphis has yet to issue a proclamation but by the founder’s own account, no place has mattered more. “Memphis, and especially Tennessee, has been essential in elevating Martyrs Day,” Browne-Marshall said. “The engine for it began in Memphis.”
“The people I interacted with, when I was hearing the idea of Martyrs Day, were very enthusiastic. Those people are Memphis residents,” Browne-Marshall said. “They were the ones who said, yes, we can do an event in Memphis, and it went from an event in Memphis to a statewide event because they’re NAACP members,” she said, crediting the Memphis Martyrs Day Committee for carrying the vision forward. The NAACP Tennessee State Conference will host an observance that culminates the inaugural Martyrs Day: a virtual panel discussion Sunday, July 5, at 5 p.m. CST, with registration required via Eventbrite.
The panel is anchored in Memphis’ own place on the civil rights timeline. It features attorney Walter Bailey Jr., who represented Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis during the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike; Emily Yellin, co-author of “Nonviolent: A Memoir of Resistance, Agitation and Love” about the life of the Rev. James Lawson; and Beverly Denise Glaze-Johnson, a licensed social worker and program director known for her community advocacy and social action leadership.
“On Saturday, we celebrate this country’s 250th anniversary of being the United States of America,” said Gloria J. Sweet Love, president of the NAACP TN State Conference, in a statement announcing the event. “On Sunday, we will celebrate those individuals who helped build this country and made sacrifices by paying with their lives for the advancement of justice for all people.”
In that sense, Martyrs Day challenges us to account for a debt we could never repay — owed to those whose signatures on this country’s contract were signed in life and blood. It challenges us to say their names and show their faces the way the presidents lined our classroom walls, and to pay forward a balance that the obstacle of systemic racism hinders from being paid in full.
Asked whether the country is too divided, too far gone, for a day like this to take root, Browne-Marshall answered with what she calls practical hope grounded in the historical record. The research behind her book showed her, over and over, people with far less facing far worse and pushing forward anyway. Women dismissed as having the minds of children won the ballot. People who were not even counted as people forced this nation closer to its own words. “Courage is fighting a foe — feeling the fear, and fighting anyway,” she said. “And that’s what’s gotten us forward.” That courage carries a challenge for the living — whether we have become “freedom freeloaders.” “Are you actually putting anything into pushing the country forward,” she asks, “or are you just benefiting and reaping from the work that was done from prior generations?”
Her hope for the day is intentionally manageable. Families already gathered for the holiday weekend can carry it to the cookout table: have the young people research a martyr and present at the family reunion, the way spotlights once shone on children at gatherings past. “No movement moves forward without young people,” she said, noting her inaugural committee includes young members who advise on how best to carry Martyrs Day across social media.
Twenty years from now, she envisions Martyrs Day as an expected part of the July calendar in every community — what she describes as “a moment of silence, a time of reflection, education, and a re-commitment to social justice.”
The fireworks will fade Saturday night. On Sunday, the country is invited to sit in the quiet that follows and remember who lit the way.
