What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?
Asked 171 years ago and still waiting for an answer
Today is not a day for tanks and flyovers or a celebration of American exceptionalism. A nation in crisis cannot honestly celebrate its hollow promises of democracy when they actually pertain to so few, and when more of them disappear with every passing day. Rather than the hollow rhetoric of the nation’s founders, today is a day to listen to the words of someone who actually fought for independence but never fully received it.
On the day after Independence Day 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered the following speech in Rochester, New York. It is a fiery reproach of American independence — “your 4th of July” not “ours” — demanding that White America keep its unfulfilled promises. 171 years later Douglass’s words still resonate, but White America’s only answer to them, so far, has been denial and criminalizing the teaching of America's racist history.
“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 denunciations 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 these United States, at this very hour.”
Douglass's entire speech can be viewed here: