Most celebrants won’t be aware of it in their patriotic glee, but there’s something wonderfully ironic and reassuring about the old Washington Avenue Bridge being re-opened to foot traffic in time for this evening’s Fourth of July festivities in Indian Spring Park. For a year and a half, the 109-year-old bridge has undergone reconstruction to bolster it again for two-lane traffic.

The work means motorists will soon also flow into East Waco, rather than just away from it. Consequently, East Waco leaders are greeting the re-opening with excitement, including talk of further revitalizing a part of our city that has long struggled against crime, civic neglect and racism.

Laveda Brown, president of the Cen-Tex African-American Chamber of Commerce, told Tribune-Herald staff writer J.B. Smith last week that the two-way configuration will strengthen the link between downtown and Elm Street, providing more business potential on the east side of the Brazos.

For those in the know, it’s impossible to ignore the old bridge’s past, encompassing the hopes of Americans at the start of the 20th century as well as the tragic failings that have marred much of this great country’s tumultuous 234 years.

More than in any other city in Texas, the seven bridges crossing the Brazos in downtown Waco (plus remnants of an eighth) chart history’s high points. They speak of cattle drives, the railroad and the U.S. Interstate Highway System. The Washington Avenue Bridge welcomed the automobile and the independence that it promised.

And yet, the history of both our city and our nation casts a long shadow over these bridges, a grave reminder on the Fourth, above all days, of the impulse by some to scuttle the high ideals of the Founders.

We see all that in the Washington Avenue Bridge. Built in 1901 as a proud collaboration of McLennan County and the city of Waco, the bridge marked a new century imbued with optimism and confidence. Only four years later, a horrific lynching took place there after 20-year-old Sank Majors, a black man, was convicted of raping a white woman. He claimed he was framed.

Majors was granted a retrial — enough justice to prompt a mob of 200 to bust him out of jail to exact some of its own. They tortured him by the Brazos River before hanging Majors from the very steel bridge that some leaders had hoped would trumpet a new day for America.

Almost a century later, race appeared to be at the root of another bridge melee when, during Fourth of July festivities in 2001, several black teens were stabbed at the nearby Waco Suspension Bridge as the fireworks ended. A jury later found Barney Dewain Oldfield, admitted member of a white supremacist group, guilty. He carried on his body tattoos of Adolf Hitler and the words “white power.”

To her credit, strong-willed City Council member Mae Jackson, one of our city’s best-known black leaders, dismissed the notion that this incident represented any sort of racial divide in the town she would one day preside over as mayor.

Two years ago, my family and I relaxed on the old Washington Avenue Bridge, awaiting the Fourth of July fireworks as a joyful sea of humanity hustled and bustled back and forth over its span. Some youths from the east side mischievously rolled lit firecrackers beneath the lawn chairs of the more settled-looking Wacoans. Cops gave pursuit. No harm was done.

But that evening, the 450-foot bridge, longest and oldest single-span truss bridge still open to vehicles anywhere, served its greater purpose as fireworks burst in mid-air, marking our independence: It brought together people of different backgrounds, different pursuits, different politics, different colors, just long enough for them to put aside the disappointments in our shared past and look heavenward in anticipation, awe and appreciation.

Tonight, as we reclaim Washington Avenue Bridge on the Fourth, we can relax knowing that the bridge has been strengthened for another 100 years of whatever fate and our own failings can throw at it. In doing so, maybe we can pause just long enough to jointly strengthen our faith in this town, this nation and ourselves as a people united against whatever this world can throw against us.