As we slide toward the July 4th holiday on Monday, we will be bombarded this weekend with messages of patriotism.

From the presidential candidates to mattress firms, many people will seek to wrap themselves in the flag as they offer pitches about liberty, freedom and the values espoused by the Founding Fathers.

Before the capitalists and propagandists hijack the holiday, we urge our readers to pause during the next few days and think about the deeper meaning of freedom, particularly in our community, because as writer James Baldwin says, some of our white cousins in America “are trapped in a history they don’t understand.”

When the Declaration of Independence, which we celebrate this weekend, promised liberty for all men in 1776, it didn’t include a large chunk of the population, namely African-Americans or women.

By the time the Revolutionary War was fought and won, and George Washington had been president for a year, more than 750,000 African-Americans were counted in the nation’s first census in 1790, 92 percent of whom were enslaved.

As we fast forward through the Civil War, Reconstruction and Jim Crow, go past the Civil Rights Movement and land on the Black Lives Matter movement of today, the images of certain people flash — Crispus Attucks, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King Jr., L. Douglas Wilder, Barack Obama.

But we remind our readers that the fight for freedom is — and always has been — a collective effort. And all of those held up in history as leaders were carried on the shoulders of thousands of others whose names and stories in the fight for freedom may remain unknown. The dream doesn’t die with the dreamer.

Angela Y. Davis points out in her recent collection of essays, “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement,” the insidious dangers and promotion of individualism that seek to rob or rewrite a group’s history and derail its progress.

“Even as Nelson Mandela always insisted that his accomplishments were collective, always also achieved by the men and women who were his comrades, the media attempted to sanctify him as a heroic individual. A similar process has attempted to disassociate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from the vast numbers of women and men who constituted the very heart of the mid-20th century U.S. freedom movement. It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals in order for people today to recognize their potential agency as a part of an ever-expanding community of struggle,” she writes.

A reader so adroitly points this out in this week’s Letters to the Editor on A7. He says the courage of the known and unknown scores of men and women who picketed the stores in Downtown Richmond must be remembered in order to understand the success of the student effort to desegregate all-white lunch counters.

Even today, our freedom is not an individual fight, but a collective one. Our success will depend not on the actions of a single individual or a handful of people, but the collective efforts of the group.

What role will you play in the fight for freedom?

The struggle continues.

“To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”— Nelson Mandela

“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

“One faces down fears today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.”

— Alice Walker