What, to This Young, Black Man, is the Meaning of Freedom?

By Christian Edge

Director of Strategic Partnerships

Freedom is not a puff pastry.

It does not have layers.

Either you are free, or you are not.

From left to right: LEFT: Christopher, Ellen & Christian; CENTER: Christopher, Charles, & Christian; RIGHT: Christian, Ellen, Christopher & Charles

My maternal grandparents, Thomas and Georgia Harvey, were born in 1910 and 1920, respectively. They made their living, while raising eight children, growing cotton, soybeans, and purple hull peas. Their names not written in the ledger of an enslaver’s journal, they were told they were free. 

My mother, Ellen M. Harvey Edge, was born in Grand Junction, Tennessee in 1951. She attended a legally segregated, two-room schoolhouse until she was fourteen years-old and was the first member of our family to obtain a college degree, majoring in biology and microbiology no less. She was told she was really free.

My mother bore three sons: Charles, in 1976, and the twins, Christopher and Christian, in 1986. Charles became the first person in the family to earn an advanced degree, Christopher, the first in the family to earn a medical degree, and Christian was the first to graduate from the Ivy League. Born as the first generation after the end of legal apartheid in the United States, the three siblings were told they were free, free. 

Freedom is not a puff pastry. It does not have layers. Either you are free, or you are not. 

How could my grandparents be free when the price of their crops, their very livelihood, was determined by the whims of white people, who, determined to keep Black people in economic bondage, eyed them with hatred and avarice? How could my grandparents be free when financial success meant certain pillaging and death? How could my grandparents be free when they did not send their children to the general store, too afraid they would not return alive?

How could my mother be free when she followed the map of the American Dream, only to find an empty hole where the treasure should be? How could my mother be free when even her ability to attend high school, which often did not even exist in the Jim Crow South, was a stroke of luck, a kind of miracle? How could my mother be free when she earned a bachelor’s degree and her professional supervisors were whites with high school diplomas? How could my mother be free when she is less likely to hold as much wealth as a white person who only completed high school? How could my mother be free when she did not even trust the medical staff in her delivery room, because Black women are 243 percent more likely to die from pregnancy and childbirth complications than white women? 

How could my brothers and I be free when the same issues that plagued previous generations still plague us? How could my brothers and I be free when our grandparents’ worst fears are still coming true? How could my brothers and I be free when one of us has to hang his physician’s white coat over the back of his seat, so the police will not murder him in a baseless traffic stop? How could my brothers and I be free when our mother tells us to whisper Trayvon Martin’s name for fear that we will face retaliation at work? How could my brothers and I be free when that retaliation still comes because our very presence, our very talent, our very voice makes our white colleagues uncomfortable? How could my brothers and I be free when we laugh without our eyes at anti-black slights in the workplace so we won’t be deemed “angry?” How could my brothers and I be free when our mother calls to tell us not to go out alone at night because strange fruit is growing yet again?

I, of course, know what freedom is. But that was not the question. What, to me, does freedom mean? Nothing, I suppose. But I dream of it. And often.

As this country celebrates the Fourth of July, do not only remember the words written by the Founding Fathers. Remember the group of people who have toiled and bled tirelessly to make those words true: Black Americans. Black Americans continue the fight in 2020, battling the police brutality, state-sanctioned murder, economic bondage and political disenfranchisement that has defined their lives in this country. That fight will continue until freedom means something, not only to me, but to all of us.