Frederick Douglas, July 4, 2020

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”
— Frederick Douglass (ca. 1818 — 1895), a speech on the twenty-fourth anniversary of Emancipation in the District of Columbia, Washington, D.C. (April 1886)

This year, descendents of Frederick Douglass read his powerful 1852 Independence Day speech “What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July?”

Related:

“How Black Lives Matter transformed the Fourth of July,” Peniel Joseph, CNN

“How Black Americans Co-opted the Fourth of July,” Livia Gershon, JSTOR Daily

African American Fourth of July

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Shortlink: https://wp.me/p6sb6-v4r

Top image (“Frederick Douglass, July 4, 2020” after an 1856 Ambrotype in the National Portrait Gallery) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.

July 5, 1852

“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 sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, 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.”

— Frederick Douglass at Corinthian Hall, Rochester NY, on July 5, 1852.

Happy Birthday, Frederick Douglass

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”

— Frederick Douglass (ca. 1818 — 1895), Speech on the twenty-fourth anniversary of Emancipation in the District of Columbia, Washington, D.C. (April 1886)

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Shortlink: http://wp.me/p6sb6-iQh

Image (from an 1856 Ambrotype in the National Portrait Gallery) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.

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