Frederick Douglass: What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?
Frederick Douglass delivers a poignant speech on the Fourth of July, exposing the hypocrisy of America celebrating freedom while denying it to slaves. He challenges the nation to confront the injustices of slavery and calls for true equality and justice. Despite the grim reality he presents, Douglass remains hopeful for the abolition of slavery in the United States.
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What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? Frederick Douglass
In this eloquent and powerful speech, Frederick Douglass (a former slave) speaks on July 4th of the hypocrisy of America for celebrating the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence while simultaneously denying them to blacks in the continuance of the institution of slavery.
Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by you fathers is shared by you, not by me The sunlight that brought light and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. "America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible which are disregarded ad trampled upon, date to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that sees to perpetuate slavery - the great sin and shame of America!"
"What to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted; your shots of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy - a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. "Notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery."
