Frederick Douglass 1817-1818 to 1895 - “What to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?”
A few facts about Frederick Douglass:
He chose his last name from a poem - He taught himself to read and write - He disguised himself as a sailor to escape slavery - He picked his birthday - He married the woman who helped him escape - Douglass was an abolitionist
He was the most photographed American of the 19th century, consciously using photography to advance his political views.
In 1848, Douglass was the only black person to attend the Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights convention, in upstate New York to pass a resolution asking for women's suffrage. This gathering planted the seeds of the future NAACP and the LWV.
He was a member of and lay preacher in the AME Zion Church. One of the reasons he joined the AMEZ church was because he experienced discrimination in the white Methodist church.
On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass was invited to address the citizens of his hometown, Rochester, New York. Douglass used the occasion not to celebrate the nation’s triumphs but to remind all of its continuing enslavement of millions of people.
“What to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?” (edited)
The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable—and the difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former, are by no means slight. That I am here today is, to me, a matter of astonishment as well as of gratitude.
This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom.
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?
I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me.
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.
My subject, then fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view. I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July!
It is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race, we are called upon to prove that we are men! Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.
What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim.
I was born amid such sights and scenes. To me the American slave-trade is a terrible reality. When a child, my soul was often pierced with a sense of its horrors. I lived on Philpot Street, Fell’s Point, Baltimore, and have watched from the wharves, the slave ships in the Basin, anchored from the shore, with their cargoes of human flesh, waiting for favorable winds to waft them down the Chesapeake.
The church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of die slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God;
The American church is guilty, when viewed in connection with what it is doing to uphold slavery; but it is superlatively guilty when viewed in connection with its ability to abolish slavery.
Americans! your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen.
I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain.
Rev. Dr. Lawrence Rankin, Chair Religious Affairs Committee
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