'What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?

Frederick Douglass, African American abolitionist.

“What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” July 5, 1852, in Rochester, N.Y.

Fredrick Douglass foreshadows the American Civil War, but he also lays bare the American people's moral crisis of slavery. Douglass uses the day after July 4 to focus on the struggle to live up to the lofty goals promised during the country's founding.

“It’s the birth of American Independence, the birth of a nation, and what the speech is saying is you must destroy first what you created and remake it, or it will be destroyed — and you with it." -- David Blight

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th 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 impudence; your shouts 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. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.”

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