truthseekersjournal
By Richard Rose | August 20, 2025
I attended a recent Atlanta City Council recognition of a community organizing colleague. The custom is the delivery of the invocation and recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. The protocol is to stand, face the flag, and place one’s right hand over the heart. “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
As I stood, I reflected on today’s America and how it currently tends toward yesterday’s America. I could not recite the pledge, although the words echoed in my mind. There is no liberty and justice for all in America. There was no justice for all in 1942 when the pledge was adopted. At that time, Black citizens across America were denied the right to vote, especially in the states of the short-lived yet ever-present Confederate States of America.
The systems of American society have limited access to its benefits for descendants of African enslavement in America that continues today. Then, as now, there were two flags. Southern states proudly flew versions of both the Confederate battle flag and that of the Confederate States of America, and in doing so proclaimed, and still proclaims, white supremacy and its evil progeny, racism.
It would be another 6 years before the American military was desegregated by executive order of Democrat President Harry Truman, and 12 years before the Supreme Court ruled that the concept of “separate but equal” is a cruel myth, ushering in Federal troop protection of six-year-old schoolgirls and boys past screaming white adults and teenagers.
Still today, there are obstacles to voting designed to suppress Black votes, some of which rely on the generational economic and educational barriers of racism.
I wish that the “pledge” truly reflected the realities of America and not just the aspirations of equality. I wish that Federal, state, county, and city governments would immediately abolish all systems and policies that promote and maintain racism and all forms of bigotry. I wish that the statues and monuments that promote and teach racism would be removed from public property. I wish that the state of Georgia would repeal its statutes that protect and fund the largest shrine to white supremacy in the history of the world at Stone Mountain Park. I wish that Black politicians would recognize the neo-colonialism in their service that maintains the barriers to liberty and justice for all. I wish that the words I learned in my segregated Tennessee elementary school, sitting at pockmarked desks supplied with 15-year-old books with missing pages, really meant something for me and the next generations.
Until then, I cannot, will not, and should not recite America’s pledge of allegiance.
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Your essay shook me deep in my spirit and down to my bones.
Every line bears the weight of history, truth, and righteous defiance. You’ve captured what so many of us have long felt but too often they (not me) swallow for the sake of civility or comfort. The clarity of your refusal to recite the pledge is not an act of protest—it is an act of integrity. A declaration of truth in a country still entangled in its “so-called founders” lies. I, too, do not recite the lie. I don’t even stand any longer.
As someone who grew up in the viciousness of Jim Crow and the well-oiled machinery of segregation, I felt every word you wrote. I, too, sat at those battered desks, flipping through hand-me-down books that erased us, underfunded schools, and far too many other injustices to count. I was taught to mouth those words by Black teachers and administrators —“liberty and justice for all”—while living in an America and a world that made a mockery of them.
And yes, we are still here. Still fighting. Still witnessing the erosion of rights, the suppression of votes, the rise of revisionist history and Confederate nostalgia disguised as “heritage.” Still watching our own people sometimes serve as caretakers of the very systems meant to keep us down. Still witnessing far too many of our people buy pyrite (fool’s gold) with a misplaced honor.
You are one of a few people I have met in my lifetime that I count as a hero. You continue to give voice to what it means to love this country enough to hold it accountable. Your words are not just powerful—they are necessary. I hope this essay reaches far and wide. Our youth need to hear it. Our elders need to be reminded. And those in power need to be made very uncomfortable, especially white racists and do-nothing Black politicians.
As always, thank you for your courage, your brilliance, your commitment to truth and saving our people from themselves, especially when they don’t even know they need saving!
In solidarity and struggle,
Lola Renegade