The Fresh Urgency of Frederick Douglass’s Independence Day Address
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?”
This question, asked by the former slave and social reformer Frederick Douglass on July 5, 1852, in a speech to an abolitionist group, resonates powerfully today, as millions have taken to the streets to demand the racial justice that America has still failed to deliver, 168 years later.
And Douglass’s own answer to the question is worth listening to, delivered in this NPR video by five of his young descendants, aged 12 to 20:
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… 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.
