HONOLULU — Hawaii welcomed its entry as the 50th state on Aug. 21, 1959, with a new postage stamp Friday, but independence supporters marked the day with passionate protest — including an effigy of Uncle Sam being beaten and Hawaii’s star cut out of the U.S. flag.
State leaders called the events Friday a statehood “commemoration” rather than a “celebration” out of respect to Native Hawaiians and their unresolved claims since the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom.
A few hundred Native Hawaiians marched through the streets of downtown Honolulu with an effigy of a 15-foot Uncle Sam holding machine guns and riding in a tank made of cardboard. They chanted in Hawaiian, blew on conch shells, waved ti leaves and yelled, “We are not Americans! We want our country back!”
“Genocide” and “imperialist” were written across the cardboard machine guns.
At the end of the march, protesters knocked off Uncle Sam’s hat, which contained a U.S. flag from which they cut out a star that represented Hawaii. They held up the burning star to a crowd yelling “freedom.”
“We were never the 50th state,” said Kaleo Farias, one of the protesters who cut the U.S. flag. “It was an illusion, fabrication, something that was told to us that never happened. We’re not part of the United States.”
The official statehood events highlighted Hawaii as a model for diversity while attempting to dispel misconceptions of the islands as an exotic location separate from the rest of the country.
President Barack Obama, who was born in the state, signed a proclamation marking the anniversary and said that in his youth he learned from Hawaii’s diversity and how different cultures, blended together into one population, were made stronger by their shared sense of community.
The postage stamp, available nationwide Friday, shows a painting of a longboard surfer and two paddlers in an outrigger canoe.
