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Culture · Light

Frederick Douglass — What to the slave is the Fourth of July?

The 1852 Rochester address, in the passage that refuses a holiday as a cover for the people left outside it. Public domain. Sealed as culture, not as consolation.

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? ... I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us.

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.

Frederick Douglass, Rochester, 5 July 1852. Public domain. Excerpt from the speech commonly titled "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?"

Inclusion

Recomputing the leaf and the path to the epoch root.

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