How Editorial Cartoonists Celebrated the Bicentennial (Part 1)

A slice of the entire cartoon, available at the link.

One of the great pleasures of this project has been digging beyond the comics of the Bicentennial into the actual news and attitudes of the day.

Not all of the attitudes were positive. On June 29, 1976, the Washington Afro-American (and other regional newspapers in the same corporate family) ran a scathing editorial and accompanying editorial cartoon about July 4th. Both uncredited items repeat and expand upon criticisms that abolitionist Frederick Douglass made in 1852, saying that Independence Day is a symbol of lack of independence for slaves.

Obviously things hadn't gotten much better by 1976. The editorial goes into great detail, and honestly it seems like it could have been written today.

It's a brilliant editorial and an important piece of history. You can read the whole thing thanks to the Google Newspaper Archive at the link above.