Open Document. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world, and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. Douglass stated that the nation's founders were great men for their ideals of freedom. For decades, slaves fled the South . It was a turbulent time for Douglass personally, too. Its also an election year; the 1852 presidential election was heating up that summer. The headings in brackets have been supplied by the editor to guide your reading as have the questions after each section. They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. How does he show that everyone in America, North and South, views enslaved Africans as human beings. In July of 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered a speech titled "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?," a call for the promise of liberty be applied equally to all Americans. What will this years event be like? It is a slander upon their memory, at least, so I believe. The iron shoe, and crippled foot of China must be seen, in contrast with nature. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work The downfall of slavery. I take it, therefore, that it is not presumption in a private citizen to form an opinion of that instrument. One person who felt that way was Douglass, the famous abolitionist, who was himself born into slavery. We feel the pain and anguish ever more severely and it is much harder to find hope for the future. EDSITEment is a project of theNational Endowment for the Humanities, Uncle Toms Cabin: Or Life among the Lowly, From Courage to Freedom: Frederick Douglass's 1845 Autobiography. Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? All rights reserved. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. "Ethiopia shall stretch out her hand unto God." More than 150 years later, Keidrick Roy, a doctoral student in American Studies at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and a U.S. Air Force veteran, will host a virtual community reading and discussion of the storied speech at the Somerville Museum on Thursday as part of the annual state-wide MassHumanities program Reading Frederick Douglass Together.. They seized upon eternal principles, and set a glorious example in their defense. In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Why does he do this? One of the parts of the speech that resonates with me the most is when Douglass says: What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? He implored the Rochester, N.Y., audience to think about the ongoing oppression of Black Americans during a holiday celebrating freedom. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and ciphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian's God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men! Douglass's speech emphasized that American slavery and American freedom is a shared history and that the actions of ordinary men and women, demanding freedom, transformed our nation. The Act also denied suspected slaves trial by jury or even the ability to testify on their own behalf in court. 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 denunciation 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. The River Campus Libraries Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation's holdings includes a manuscript collection of Douglass's letters, photographs, and ephemera. Th oppressd shall vilely bend the knee, It was one of five autobiographies he penned,. What is this but the acknowledgment that the slave is a moral, intellectual, and responsible being? Interview was lightly edited for clarity and length. GAZETTE: This is your second year as host of Reading Frederick Douglass Together in Somerville. In the fervent aspirations of William Lloyd Garrison, I say, and let every heart join in saying it: God speed the year of jubilee When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then will I argue with you that the slave is a man! Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. Is slavery among them? What characteristics does he praise about them? However, this was not the purpose of Douglass's speech. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. Douglasss searing ability to cut through the rhetoric of freedom and democracy lives on in works like these that reveal the enduring cruelty of the exemption as it continues to haunt our flawed legal and punishment systems. Fully appreciating the hardship to be encountered, firmly believing in the right of their cause, honorably inviting the scrutiny of an on-looking world, reverently appealing to heaven to attest their sincerity, soundly comprehending the solemn responsibility they were about to assume, wisely measuring the terrible odds against them, your fathers, the fathers of this republic, did, most deliberately, under the inspiration of a glorious patriotism, and with a sublime faith in the great principles of justice and freedom, lay deep the corner-stone of the national superstructure, which has risen and still rises in grandeur around you. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. Douglass continued to add to the speech in the years that followed. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. He follows this observation by closing with words from William Lloyd Garrison, suggesting the new reach of the great abolitionist across the ocean as part of a global abolition movement. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. As we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, our economy continues to recover. At the same time, we need to be studying the history of slavery and racism in this country so we can build policies, practices, and procedures that address the present problems with those historical inequities in mind. It is, he declares, the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom.. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth." But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. They were great men toogreat enough to give fame to a great age. If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. He begins his speech by modestly apologizing for being nervous in front of the crowd and recognizes that he has come a long way since his escape from slavery. We convened a group of interested parties, met a few times over a couple of months, and decided to launch an event on the Common. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Harvard Law Today recently interviewed David Harris, managing director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice at Harvard Law School, the events cosponsor, about the public reading and the continued relevance of Douglass words. I recall seeing a group of young blonde-haired children standing at the wall overlooking the reading as a group of late adolescents and young men sat on the adjacent steps on a lunch break from their work with YouthBuild. So, all these years later, our massive system of incarceration echoes Douglasss charge that, 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. This is not to say there are not tyrannical regimes elsewhere in the world or that other nations do not abuse human rights, but it is the self-righteousness of our celebration in the midst of ongoing injustice that continues to resonate today. For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. 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. You may rejoice, I must mourn. Everyone is welcome to read; this event is free and open to the public. I have been thinking a lot about these two and have discovered that it is also the 400th anniversary of the first instance of representative government in Jamestown. A small group would gather in a circle and take turns reading paragraphs from the speech. Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation's jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? These rules are well established. God speed the hour, the glorious hour, Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. As with any great oration, Douglass builds to his point, which is to distinguish between the spirit of celebration typically surrounding the holiday and the misery suffered by enslaved people on that day and every day. I think he would look at the ongoing gulf between our ideals and reality and might refer back to some of his own analysis to understand the current contradictions. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! "I will not equivocate; I will not excuse"; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just. The country was in the midst of crises over fugitive slave rescues in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. that he is the rightful owner of his own body? This is the inevitable conclusion, and from it there is no escape. No! In the early 1850s, tensions over slavery were high across the county. Convicted terrorists will be banned from taking a leading role in religious services and face more rigorous checks for extremist literature. As I mentioned earlier, the first reading was designed to the think about race in the Age of Obama. I remember that first year, looking out at the crowd I was filled with the kind of hope Douglass expressed at the end of his speech. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. 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. We have a precise date for that first, momentous vote, which set the pattern of exclusion with which we still live, but no such precision marks the arrival of 50 captive Africans sometime in August, 1619. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. Indeed, his speech, which warns that Your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent, should be required reading for any such commission. Senator Berrien tell us that the Constitution is the fundamental law, that which controls all others. They succeeded; and to-day you reap the fruits of their success. Yea! Well, we have all come to understand that while on its face this amendment appeared to outlaw forever slavery and involuntary servitude, its exception for those serving a punishment for crime left open the door for what Douglas Blackmon has called Slavery by Another Name and Ana DuVernays so painfully rendered film, 13th, revealed as continued oppression in the 21st century. Why, then, did Douglass speak as harshly as he did? I am not that man. speaking of it relatively and positively, negatively and affirmatively. Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. But I differ from those who charge this baseness on the framers of the Constitution of the United States. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, "may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!" There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. For more information on this event visit CharlesHamiltonHouston.org. Funny you should ask. But we also need to invest as a city and as a society into reading and learning more about the present realities of oppressed peoples. Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? Many historians consider this effort to be Douglass's finest oration, and arguably one of the most powerful American political speeches ever written. Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. "For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder," he said. Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? The testimony of Senator Breese, Lewis Cass, and many others that might be named, who are everywhere esteemed as sound lawyers, so regard the constitution. Its future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorrow. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our, Digital Would you argue more, and denounce less, would you persuade more, and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. In the orations most famous passages, Douglass discussed what it felt like to see such festivities and to know independence was not a given for people like him: What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Read by Ava Yuninger, Music by Ava Yuninger 00:00 00:00 Has the public reading of the speech each year on Boston Commonor the experience or meaning of itchanged over the years? Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery the great sin and shame of America! 11th annual public reading of What to the slave is the Fourth of July? takes place on July 2nd at noon on Boston Common, Photo via the Harvard Gazette David Harris, managing director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice at Harvard Law School. Each foe. Is that a question for Republicans? I dont know what kind of person he was or how he thought of himself. He was invited to give a fourth of July speech by the Ladies Anti-Slavery Society of Rochester. My business, if I have any here today, is with the present. I said then and throughout his presidency that rather than freeing us from talking about race, his election freed us to talk about it; and we entitled that first event: Reading Frederick Douglass in the Age of Obama.. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. Read the address in full onPBS. Keidrick Roy, the host of the virtual reading event. Douglass praises and respects the signers of the Declaration of Independence, people who put the interests of a country above their own. The people who came to America were surprised by its history. But all to manhoods stature tower, What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? He would use the Fourth of July for its irony over and over and over, just like the Declaration of Independence is used to remind the country of its potential and promise, and to him, race was always the measure of that, he says. The fact of slavery ruins the celebrations of the Fourth of July. And instead of being the honest men I have before declared them to be, they were the veriest imposters that ever practiced on mankind. . Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? So witness Heaven! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people! Sign up for daily emails to get the latest Harvardnews. Mark them! America has been working to fully live up to the ideals laid out in the Declaration of Independence ever since the document was printed on July 4, 1776. SOURCE FORMAT: Public speech (excerpt) WORD COUNT: 1,660 words Excerpt from Frederick Douglass's "Fifth of July" Speech (1852). The new rules are part of a government plan to crack . We may finally be thinking about creating a commission to study the possibility of reparationsas with all deliberate speed, the American way of tackling a problem takes so much time and patienceand for this we can be thankful. To what other elements in the American political tradition does he appeal? The audience of Douglass' message were abolitionists, who were white people from the north who did not own slaves and wanted to abolish slavery. The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. Go forth. Frederick Douglass published three autobiographies. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Douglass's voluminous writings and speeches reveal a man who believed fiercely in the ideals on which America was founded, but understoodwith the scars to prove itthat democracy would . To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, is inhuman mockery. The papers and placards say, that I am to deliver a 4th of July oration. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. The claims of human brotherhood, ROY: The event that were doing in Somerville puts pressure on whitewashed conceptions of the Fourth of July, as many people to this day still view it as a celebration of American food, fireworks, and freedom. Alison Drasner, the project coordinator for the Somerville Museum, teamed up with Dave Ortega at the Somerville Media Center to prerecord voices of 50 Somerville residents, including my 7-year-old daughter, Charlotte, to read sections of the speech. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. They are plain, common-sense rules, such as you and I, and all of us, can understand and apply, without having passed years in the study of law. In the second part of the speech, Douglass turns to the present and his own feelings about the 4th of July celebration. This project began in the library of an organization called Community Change, which was founded by Horace Seldon in 1968 to address the white problem at the root of American inequality revealed by the Kerner Report. As with rivers so with nations. Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Restore. He concedes, however, that the main purpose of his speech is not to give praise and thanks to these men, for he says that the deeds of those patriots are well known. He who will, intelligently, lay down his life for his country, is a man whom it is not in human nature to despise. There is blasphemy in the thought. In the early 2000s Community Change started a tradition of reading the Douglass speech in its library. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. But it is answered in reply to all this, that precisely what I have now denounced is, in fact, guaranteed and sanctioned by the Constitution of the United States; that the right to hold and to hunt slaves is a part of that Constitution framed by the illustrious Fathers of this Republic. Do you think Douglass would be surprised to learn that Americans are reciting his words nearly 170 years later? In an Independence Day address in 1852, abolitionist movement leader Frederick Douglass famously asked a gathering in Rochester, New York What to the slave is the Fourth of July?Answering his own question, it is a day, he said, that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. Douglass speech laid bare the hypocrisy of American ideals of freedom at a time when millions were living in Constitutionally-sanctioned bondage across the United States. He does some of his greatest writing in early 1850s during this terrible personal crisis, Blight says, and right there in the middle of it comes the greatest speech hes ever delivered, of the hundreds of speeches he delivered in his life.. I repeat, I am glad this is so. On this, the bicentennial year of Douglasss birth, the Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives and American Universitys Antiracist Research and Policy Center are honoring 200 Americans whose work best reflects his legacy. You may rejoice, I must mourn.. Above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. God speed the day when human bloodShall cease to flow!In every clime be understood,The claims of human brotherhood,And each return for evil, good,Not blow for blow;That day will come all feuds to end.And change into a faithful friendEach foe. Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic are, distinctly heard on the other.. Host called senior colleague a C-word in text message obtained by lawyers as part of Dominion lawsuit Tucker Carlson's firing from Fox News came after he used vulgar language to describe a . That bolt drawn, that chain broken, and all is lost. It occurred to me that it would be of interest to many others if they knew about it. Must we allow symbols of racism on public land? What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, Watch: A Conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Oprah Winfrey, Media Mogul and Philanthropist, National Museum of African American History & Culture, A Nation's Story: What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?.