In that way Todd Stauffer and I disappear on long road trips when we need to stop talking to other people for a while, we found ourselves driving the long way across Texas on the Fourth of July. Yes, that Independence Day as the nation celebrated or at least acknowledged the irony of July 4, 1776, during a tough run for the future of American freedom and democracy.
It’s not a stretch to ask if our first republic, as Todd likes to call it, can last another 250 years or, hell, another 250 days the way things are going. Actual freedoms and democracy are sinking like my teenage boyfriend’s red pickup truck suddenly did in a Neshoba County swamp back in my youthful mudding days.
We Americans live in a swirl right now with gnats and gits biting away at our hard-won freedoms from every direction, collectively feeling like that chick in the gif swatting every whichaway. It’s hard to get out of bed in the morning and decide which tenet of the ongoing and unfinished American experiment to focus on shoring up for an hour or two before another scatterbomb hits, thrusting our attention toward the assault du moment.
Who’s the target right now, this second? Haitians? Trans folks? Childless women? Librarians? Scientists? Dreamers? History teachers? Journalists? We the true freedom-for-all lovers flail amid the miasma, our hearts racing. We’re scared to blink, bringing another assault to our mental big screen. We need to do something, but what? How can what we do even matter when the U.S. Supreme Court is one heartbeat away from overturning birthright citizenship for God’s sake, the very core of this nation’s collaborative efforts to be greater than the sum of a dark past?
We all know, if it wasn’t censored away from us or we live in a box without an Internet connection, that America was problematic all the way back to the early 1600s. That was the real birth of the nation back when my, and many of your people’s people, were a part of a dark Solomonic choice of splitting the future freedom baby in two by choosing slavery as our colonists’ savior. That desperate decision came amid not exactly being hospitable guests and neighbors of the Natives who owned this rock, with the colonists almost starving to death due to their own bloody colonial greed.
Then came all the lies and unscientific superiority muckery their progeny would use to justify their often-inherited riches and upward mobility slavery promised—from small farmers armed with land grants to the creation of Wall Street enriched by the slave trade right up through the Civil War.
Then, by 1776, future generations were fighting for freedom from the crown and its taxes—if not their own ancestors’ choices to build a divided, racialized, have/have-not nation—to beat the motherland and win their independence. Alas, they didn’t fight to overthrow the old order of riches-via-human-ownership, but to avoid high taxes and treatment by the powers that sent their people here in the first place. Call it incremental growth.
Like many of you probably, I had ancestors on both sides of the American Revolution, fighting each other in pivotal North Carolina battles—but I’m for that important if incomplete victory over the old guard. That uprising was an opening for actual freedom, although most of the winners didn’t want it for everyone. But the wheels would start turning—too slowly but grinding forward—in a nation whose new power class didn’t mean the freedom thing for everyone, either. But it would start to happen anyway, with many dying for it. It’s not like the victory meant a huge fireworks display sprinkling freedom down on all Americans on July 5, 1776; the winners still wanted enslaved Black labor and compliant women-servants to make scads of babies, but it was a start.
Put gently: No matter how many red, white and blue t-shirts and socks Target, New York street vendors and truck stops sold in the America 250 hype, freedom did not descend for most Americans two-and-a-half centuries ago last Saturday, any more than those liberty-seekers suddenly decided to free their stolen labor. But the sparks were there and what they ignited was a slow burn over generations of slave-owning and attacks on Native Americans and immigrants, with most Americans still blocked from voting, facing frontier injustice, and within a century facing an ugly civil war to preserve slavery and force new territories and states to reject being “free.”
So on July 4, 2026, amid the A-250 hype—because that’s what it is when so many freedoms are still on the line—we needed a break. So we decided to load up two snack bags and head west across a battered America.
Davis’ March to the Pacific
I must’ve been burned out. I managed not to talk about any American history, really, until we were about halfway across Texas. I was studying my tattered road atlas—you cannot properly road-trip without analog maps to pique your curiosity and cause a sudden jaunt into the unknown. I buy map books on road trips around the world, and they always pay off in ways my map apps don’t.
This time, it was a county farther down the interstate that caught my eye: Jeff Davis. Yes, our Jeff Davis, that old SOB. OK, I’m fully aware that Texas was all up in the Confederacy and doesn’t get nearly enough grief for either its own race violence or its stunning Declaration of Secession, which is more blunt than Mississippi’s, imagine.
But, they also named a damned county after Jeff Davis after the war. Yep, same one, a quick search confirmed as Todd braced himself for a half-hour of my yelping. And they named it for him in 1887, a good 22 years after he lost the war to maintain and extend slavery to new states and force the return of runaway humans. This continued tribute naming should shock us.
But in 1854, Fort Davis was named after him, when he was the U.S. Secretary of War (ahem; what’s old really is new again), who defended against Comanche and Apache raids (on their stolen land). He’d helped lead expulsions of Native Americans from their homelands, including in Texas, where the storied Rangers joined up with local lynch mobs to lynch and massacre Mexicans into the 20th century. The Lone Star State also honored Davis with a mountain range in the area.
President Jeff Davis wanted Texas Confederates to make their moves into the West, where they hoped to work with western Rebels there (who wanted slavery in their territories; expansion was a major goal of the uprising) to take control of gold from western mines that was helping the Union afford to stave off their southern brothers’ rebellion.
In fact, the Confederates won their first battle in the New Mexico Territory, but then the Union beat them and ran them back to Texas in the Battle of Glorietta Pass, effectively stopping Davis’ March to the Pacific.
Dixie Worship Movement in the West
I stared at the screen in my lap, an old refrain running through my head: How did I not know all this? OK, I knew Davis, just like fellow rat-bastard Andrew Jackson, was brutal to Indigenous Americans—but how had my history books distilled the Civil War into a neat north-south frame and managed to leave out the attempts to take the western theater? (To be fair, my schoolbooks as a kid were blatantly pro-Confederacy and pro-Manifest Destiny, so.)
Todd, who grew up in Texas, didn’t know this westward-expansion history, either. We had learned, after a road trip in southern Utah a few years back, that former Confederates worked with Mormons—who’d also owned slaves—during the Civil War to try to establish cotton plantations there, but failed due to conditions, duh.
There was long a Dixie worship movement in southern Utah and in nearby Nevada, as in the now-former Dixie State University and the UNLV Rebels, complete with their own now-retired version of Colonel Reb called “Hey, Reb.” (You can’t unsee it once you see it.) And y’all can still see Confederate flags on pickup trucks down over yonder in Utah’s Dixie. And of course, there’s still the Dixie National Forest spread around Utah.
But I hadn’t known about Southern slave holders and wannabes eyeing control of the Pacific Coast. Suddenly, I was awake and back to my raving self. “How do they not teach us this shit?” I demanded of Todd. “How in hell do we keep honoring bigot slavers like that old racist goat Jefferson Davis?” He’s used to it and just as outraged about it, although less demonstrative.
I then dared to read more about the “Indian Wars” Davis and others conducted across the South and Midwest, the stolen land, the harassment and violence, their manifest belief that it was their destiny to just take whatever the hell they wanted. Their what’s-old-is-new-again shtick claimed their victims were too inferior to use their land properly as they split up families, violated their own treaties and locked people onto reservations and in camps. Those lessons are still fresh with Todd and me after last year’s South Dakota/Pine Ridge/Wounded Knee eye-opening road trip. Whew.
I was still fuming at what American kids and adults don’t know and aren’t taught about our history when we started rolling up on Colorado City (pop. 3,859), past miles of windmills seeming to defy certain stereotypes about Texas.
I was pondering the attempts now to reduce knowledge that could actually bring us all together in the present as we collaborate to lessen the effects and make us all more prosperous and kind as a united nation—and then I saw the flashes.
“These are huge fireworks!” I exclaimed to Todd about the rockets’ red glare on the horizon. He hit the gas. We needed to get closer to this remarkable spectacle in the middle of seemingly nowhere.
The Bombs Bursting In Air
Soon, the best fireworks display I’d ever seen was bursting over our heads. I mean, seriously fancy, creative, artistic combinations covering the West Texas big sky. As a denizen of surprise peak moments, I was speechless. Todd ripped a right onto a two-lane highway and then screeched to a halt on the dirt shoulder.
We jumped out and stood there, leaning against the car, for half an hour, looking up into the gallantly streaming sparkles. We could see a crowd of cars parked in a dirt lot across the highway where we should’ve stopped. It was dead quiet 275 miles north of the Mexican border as the crow flies, all of us mesmerized.
As I looked up into a live kaleidoscope, a wave of defiant patriotism swept over me. I already know true freedom and equality (of opportunity and outcomes, mind you) for all people are the damn things most worth fighting for, but I felt it viscerally then. I thought of the Confederates in my family aspiring to afford slaves; and old Jeff and Andy and all the displaced and massacred and fenced-in Indigenous peoples; and the concentration camps uber-wealthy people are setting up now for immigrants and their children as if they’ve never sat through a real history lesson in their lives.
I thought of my early Jackson Free Press motivator/mentor Bob Moses, and my buddy James Meredith, and Medgar Evers’ children watching Daddy shot down in front of them like a wild animal at the deer camp. I thought of Mississippi native Ida B. Wells calling out all the racist bullshit and white violence in her Memphis newspaper, The Free Speech and Headlight. That included the race massacres across America, including Texas. So many unquestioning Americans today don’t even know the race brutality that happened in their city or state as they piously pile all the collective pain, violence and responsibility for racism on the South.
Look, I get the urge to leave the U.S. rather than fight for its better angels and help seed more of them. I’ve felt it deeply. But I also know that wasn’t the commission those angels managed to assign me at birth in ways I don’t try to understand. My calling is to stand up for freedom and not for the power-starved charlatans with Nordic-toned skin like mine who’ve decided that makes them superior to those who look darker. It doesn’t, and that evidence has been around us Americans for 250 years, or 407 if we’re being intellectually honest.
Many of our violent white ancestors screwed up so much for so many people after first building a façade of freedom that was limited to them, and it’s been up to the rest of us to finish the expansion. All throughout, there have been many freedom-frauds who want to tear progress down or build impenetrable walls so others can’t get in, and they are the people who must inspire us to prove we mean it. In so many ways, the willingness to fight for freedom for all of us is the test of who we are as people and as an imperfect, work-in-progress republic.
As the crowd across the road cheered as the fireworks faded, I felt the fight bubbling within. We’ve got this, damn it.
Expulsion of the Inferior
By the time we got to El Paso the next day, I still had the holiday spirit, of a fashion. Or at least the day-after hangover as I thought about the often-daunting responsibility of stepping outside our selfish or fearful lanes and standing up for what this country is supposed to be about.
When we laid our eyes on the U.S.-Mexican border and the see-through wall that follows the Rio Grande and splits cities in two, I thought about our trip to Berlin in 2024. Most of Germany’s 96-mile wall that divided the city and families is gone now, with a cobblestone outline on the ground and streets that you can walk along the whole way if you want. We visited two monuments that used old parts of the wall to warn us to heed the lessons of the past.
One section outside the Topographie des Terrors museum in an old Gestapo building is lined with jarring explanations and images of Nazi beliefs and practices (many were American-inspired and still among us). It made what had long seemed horrific-but-distant to me real-and-present, and frankly, it was an admonition.
Many powerful people in America today, including Vice President JD Vance, are obsessed with “white” birthrates as a way to increase the number of white Americans, amid efforts to expel many Black and Brown immigrants from the nation. Way too many Americans are worried about the U.S. no longer being majority-white in 20 years.
In Berlin, we also wandered along the East Side Gallery, which is actually a stretch of the old wall of division. It is covered with a variety of colorful murals and art—indicating dark reminders of why we can’t forget and uplifting joy in the freedom that replaced a brutal regime bent on racial hygiene of the population and murder and expulsion of the so-called inferior.
We talked to younger Berliners of various ethnicities about how their forebears had tried to scale the wall to see loved ones on the other side. Some died doing it. Many there tend to be nice to Americans as they tell us about how our nation, imperfect though it can be now and was then, assisted many stuck inside the wall and, ultimately, helped bring the damn thing down so families and their city could reunite. That country remembers.
The biggest lesson for me in Berlin, perhaps, is that Germany went through the hell that is hate based on race, ethnicity, religion, origin and sexual orientation and came out on the other side. It, so far, has been vigilant about not repeating the same mistakes as a populace, together turning back Nazi-nostalgic groups that even the most powerful Americans today defend. Yikes.
I’ve written multiple times about the lesson that Mississippi Freedom Summer co-leader Bob Moses embedded in me one day in Neshoba County: Freedom is a struggle. It always will be. It can never be taken for granted, and it is always, always, always worth fighting for over and over again. Without active cultivation and a sometimes-perilous fight, it goes away—and it might not grow back.
We can, and must, scale this wall of freedom together. That is how we prove through the darkness that our flag is still there—and that the last 250 years have actually meant something real and lasting.
This MFP Voices opinion essay reflects the personal opinion of its author(s). The column does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.
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