THIS WEEK IN
JULY 4 — JULY 10
Frederick Douglass delivers his iconic Fourth of July speech July 5, 1852 On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass stood before the 600-odd members of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society in Central New York and delivered what would become one of his most famous speeches, best known today as “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
You may have already noticed that this was a Fourth of July speech given on the Fifth of July—Douglass was originally invited to address the group on July 4th, but he asked to speak the following day instead, in order (as others have pointed out) to commemorate another, related, occasion: July 5, 1827, the day after New York’s emancipation law finally took effect, when 4,000 Black citizens marched along Broadway, accompanied by an honor guard, to celebrate their long-sought freedom.
That summer of 1852, America was already roiling over the question of slavery. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin had just been published that spring and was taking the country by storm. The country was in the midst of crises over fugitive slave rescues in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The political party system was beginning to tear itself asunder over the expansion of slavery,” David Blight, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, told TIME. “It’s also an election year; the 1852 presidential election was heating up that summer. The Nativist party is rising. It’s an extraordinary political moment.” With this speech, Douglass met that moment and then some.
The address begins with Douglass talking about the Fourth of July as his listeners must understand it. He compliments the “wise men” who rebelled against England’s oppression; he describes the birth of America as “dignified and sublime.” He expresses his respect for the founders and for their commitment to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” And then his speech takes a turn away from the past and toward the present.
Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? 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? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us? . . .
I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! 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, bequeathed 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 to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, lowering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people! . . .
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. [Read the full text of Douglass’ speech here.]
Douglass knew the speech was going to be a hit; he had it printed right after he gave it and sold it on his travels for 50 cents a copy. He continued to deliver versions of the address, with changes and additions, on future Fourths and Fifths of July, even as late as 1872. It’s not surprising that it has weathered the years: if you read the speech in full, its conclusions about the ongoing American quest to live up to its own stated ideals of equality and justice for all—and the hypocrisy of not living up to those ideals—are almost as relevant now as they were then.
Last year, a group of Douglass’s descendants gathered to read his speech in this video produced by NPR. It’s worth a rewatch:
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MORE ON FREDERICK DOUGLASS
NOT LIGHT, BUT FIRE “At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.” —FREDERICK DOUGLASS
on the 5th of July
In other (old) news this week Scotland Yard seizes 13 of D.H. Lawrence’s (nude) paintings from a London gallery on grounds of indecency (July 5, 1929) • Lucy Maud Montgomery, creator of Anne of Green Gables (the Patron Saint of Girls Who Ask Too Many Questions) marries Ewan MacDonald in Prince Edward Island, Canada (July 5, 1911) • The first issue of The Nation is published (July 6, 1865) • Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio, soon to delight and inspire millions, begins serialization in an Italian newspaper (July 7, 1881) • Charles Thomas Wooldridge is hanged at Reading Gaol, inspiring his fellow prisoner Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol (July 7, 1896) • James Joyce’s collection Pomes Penyeach is published by Shakespeare and Company in Paris (July 7, 1927) • Percy Bysshe Shelley is drowned at sea (July 8, 1822) • Paul Verlaine gets drunk and shoots his ex-lover Arthur Rimbaud in a Brussels hotel (July 10, 1873)
“To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that’s political, in its most profound way.” –JUNE JORDAN
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