On the 4th, celebrate the flag and consider democracy’s fragility

As we prepare to celebrate Independence Day with booming fireworks, billowing American flags and family barbecues, it is worth recalling the unconventional patriotism of a New Jersey resident whose art explored America’s racial history and commitments to democracy.

Faith Ringgold died in April at the age of 93 in Englewood, where she lived and worked the last three decades of her life. While many Americans understand patriotism as a celebration of national heritage, Ringgold was a towering figure in an African American tradition that submits patriotism to critical examination. This tradition, beginning with Frederick Douglass’ “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Addressed in 1852, it has been a primary way Americans have reevaluated their history and expanded the contours of citizenship.

Already an established artist of the African American experience, Ringgold moved to Englewood from Harlem in 1992 to build an art studio. The project sparked controversy when the local zoning board opposed its plans to build the studio. Ringgold recalled the “resistance” she received from some white residents, which she recognized as racial animus. But her persistence won out, and Ringgold helped create a more inclusive Englewood, much as the Black Freedom Movement that was her muse created a more inclusive America. “Faith Ringgold: Coming to Jones Road,” an exhibit at Gallery Bergen in Paramus last year, showcased her New Jersey-inspired work.

New Jersey artists and activists have often generated some of our most important reflections on American patriotism and national identity. From Bruce Springsteen’s song, “Born in the USA,” to Phillip Roth’s novel, American Pastoral, and Randolph Bourne’s essays on American involvement in World War I, these counter-narratives of American patriotism complicate the terms of national affection we celebrate on July 4th .

For Ringgold, reimagining American democracy meant reframing the centerpiece of our patriotism: the American flag. Amid the anti-Vietnam War and Black Power movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ringgold began employing the American flag as her canvas.

In 1970, she participated in an exhibition at Judson Memorial Church in New York called “The People’s Flag Show,” and was arrested on charges of desecration for exhibiting pieces that displayed the American flag stained with blood, alluding to the violence of the war abroad and racial discrimination at home.

One of her most important works in this vein was a story quilt from 1997 entitled “The Flag is Bleeding #2.”

The piece shows an African American mother with bloodshot eyes, the blood emanating like tears from her eye, dripping down to the hands and arms of the children she embraces, suggesting the violence and loss endured by the Black mother in America and the intergenerational qualities of this trauma, the persistence of racial violence.

Ringgold’s work found new audiences with the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, which again placed the intersection of protest and patriotism at the center of our national consciousness.

“The flag is so important,” Ringgold said in 2018, “because it means so much to us as a nation. However, nobody should be, what, brutalized for using it to express evil in America.”

Being arrested for political expression gave Ringgold a love for an alternative, if never fully realized, America. She sketched what political theorists have called “constitutional patriotism” — not a nostalgic attachment to a mythic nation of the past, but care for the civil liberties and civil rights that make up America’s democratizing tradition.

In 1990, Ringgold designed an American flag poster piece, entitled “Freedom of Speech,” honoring the 200th anniversary of the Bill of Rights. Now in the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the piece places the words of the First Amendment alongside the names of individuals and activists whose freedom of speech has been quashed in American history — the shining ideals of liberal democracy alongside the blunt realities of our anti-democratic history.

The African American writer and chronicler of the Civil Rights era, James Baldwin, wrote that the artist carries on “a lover’s war with society.” Ringgold exemplified Baldwin’s ethic, articulating a love of country that squarely faced America’s iniquities, while also eliciting affection for the democratic promise of American political culture.

July 4th is an opportunity not only to celebrate the flag but to reflect on the fragility of our democracy.

Faith Ringgold can help us do both.

Maxwell G. Burkey, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of Political Science at Kean University.

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