Stateside With Rosalea Barker
What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July?
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.
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 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.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through
South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the every-day
practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America
reigns without a rival.
Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852
Image from ABC's July 4 show, Nick and Jessica's Tour of Duty
rosalea.barker@gmail.com
--PEACE--