In the early stages of the 2020 Presidential election, and as Congress conducts hearings on a bill to establish a commission to examine the lingering effects of slavery on life in the United States, the history of race and racism in the United States is coming into sharper focus. During the first Democratic Party debates, Senator Kamala Harris of California dramatically confronted former Vice-President Joseph Biden about his questionable Civil Rights record.
On July 4th, it is worth revisiting an 1852 speech by Frederick Douglass on the meaning of Independence Day celebrations for enslaved Africans. Frederick Washington Bailey was born in Maryland in 1817. As the son of a white man and an enslaved African woman, he inherited his mother’s status as a slave. In 1838, he escaped to New York City where he married and changed his name to Frederick Douglass. The Douglass’ then moved to more relative safety in New England where he became an agent and lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Through his writing, speaking, and fund-raising, Frederick Douglass became one of the nation’s leading opponents of slavery. In 1852, he was invited by the city of Rochester, New York to be a July 4th speaker. I suspect his speech, actually delivered on July 5 and excerpted here, was not what they anticipated. Instead of celebrating the country’s founders, Douglass sharply condemned slavery and racism as national hypocrisy. To his largely white audience, Douglass said, “The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence [given] by your fathers is shared by you, not by me.”
"What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?"
by Frederick Douglass
“Fellow Citizens, pardon me, and allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I or those I represent to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? 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 [given] by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life 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. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today? . . .
Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilant shouts that reach them . . . To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow citizens, is ‘American Slavery.’ I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave’s point of view…conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July . . .
What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of 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; our 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. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.”
The United States in 2019 is not the United States in 1852. But racism and inequality remain, as Senator Kamala Harris reminded us. I think today Douglass would be outraged at the Trump administration’s treatment of undocumented immigrants and refugees, separating families, and warehousing people in concentration camps (I agree with OAC’s characterization of the refugee centers). They are crimes that would, in Douglass’ words, “disgrace a nation of savages.”
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