Still clocked in: What independence day owes my ancestors
TheGrio...
Author and respiratory therapist Jonathan Conyers reflects on what 250 years of American independence means to him as a descendant of enslaved people.
Every July 4th, while most of the country is at a barbecue or watching fireworks light up the sky, I’m at work. It’s not a boycott. It’s not a statement. It’s just where I’ve always found myself, in the hospital, doing the job, while the country celebrates the freedom my ancestors weren’t afforded. And there’s a symmetry that I can’t ignore.
In 1776, while the Founding Fathers were signing a document that declared all men free, my ancestors were still out in the fields. No holiday. No day off. No mention of them in “All men are created equal.”
Nearly 250 years later, and I’m still working on the Fourth of July. The details have changed completely. The through line hasn’t. Black folks have always been the ones still on the clock, while America celebrates its hypocrisies.
I’m a respiratory therapist. On Independence Day, patients still need to breathe, machines still need to be watched, and somebody has to be there. I’ve made peace with that rhythm over the years. But I won’t pretend the irony is lost on me. The nation is out enjoying liberty on a day that, for the first hundred years of its existence, didn’t apply to people who looked like me. And here I am, generations later, working through it too. Just for a paycheck this time instead of survival.
Juneteenth is different. That’s the day I go all out. That’s the cookout, the music, the dark drinks, the stories passed down at the table. That’s the day that marks when freedom rang its beautiful melody to the people who fell deaf from the depth of oppression’s overwhelming grasp. Two and a half years late, it was delivered by soldiers riding into Galveston, Texas, to inform enslaved Black people the news that should have already been true.
So, I understand why some folks in our community look at the Fourth and feel nothing but distance. Frederick Douglass said it plainly in 1852, standing in front of a white audience and asking them what the Fourth of July meant to someone who was still in chains while the fireworks still lit up the sky. That question hasn’t fully gone away. Not when Black people were still being lynched on Independence Day well into the 20th century. Not when our grandparents and great-grandparents celebrated this country’s freedom while being denied basic dignity in it.
That history is real, and I refuse to stand down its edges just to make the holiday feel more comfortable. But here’s where I land, and where I’ve always landed: I still believe in this country. Not because it earned my trust with a clean record. It didn’t. I believe in it because I’ve watched what my people have built inside it, in spite of it, against every odd it stacked against us. I believe in it because I’ve spent years in classrooms with young people who debate, argue, and organize like the future actually belongs to them. And I believe in it because belief isn’t the same as blind loyalty. Believing in America has always meant believing in what it could become, not settling for what it’s been.
That’s not naivety. That’s tradition. Douglass himself, after that same speech, spent his life fighting for the country to live up to its own promise instead of walking away from it. Every generation of Black Americans since has done the same. Pushed, marched, built, ran for office, raised children, started businesses, and yes, worked on the Fourth of July, not because we forgot the history, but because we refused to let that history be the final word.
I think that’s the real meaning of this holiday for Black Americans. Not a celebration in the uncomplicated, flag-waving sense. Something more layered than that. It’s the ability to hold two truths at once: this country was built on a lie about who counted as free, and this country is still worth fighting for, worth showing up for, worth building inside of.
Juneteenth is our reminder of where freedom actually started for us. The Fourth is a reminder of the gap between what America promised on paper in 1776 and what it’s still working to deliver.
So, this year, when I clock in on July 4th, I won’t be doing it with resentment. I’ll be doing it the way I always do, quietly, steadily, showing up the way my family has always shown up, even when the country was slow to show up for us. Except this time, I’m getting paid, I get to go home at the end of my shift, and nobody owns my labor but me.
That’s not nothing. That’s everything, actually. That’s not contradiction. That’s what it looks like to love something honestly. To see it clearly, name what it got wrong, and still choose to build with it anyway.
That’s the America I believe in. And it’s the one I’m still fighting for.