Independence Day at its best is a call to action to leave our children an America as good as its promise.

This time of year makes me think about my family’s journey in this country. My father’s family is white. He descends from the youngest combatant at the Battle of Lexington and Concord. My mother’s family is Black. She descends from two Black Virginia statesmen who helped to rebuild the Commonwealth after the Civil War. One of them descended from Thomas Jefferson’s grandmother.

Today, both families, like many Americans, live at or near some version of the same address. It is that place where there used to be factories and when they shut down, what shot up was poverty, despair, suicide and opiate addiction. And as if all that were not enough to deal with, it keeps getting hotter. The floods come more often. The super storms do as well.

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Source: Chicago Sun Times

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