By Marian Wright Edelman
On a Fourth of July when many Americans are expressing profound concerns about whether the government’s orders, decisions, and votes are representing their voices and asking questions about what we the people means today, it is an opportune time to return to the keynote speech Frederick Douglass gave in Rochester, New York, at an Independence Day celebration on July 5, 1852. By then he was already well-known as an orator and author of the 1845 autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, and he was focused on the nation’s intentional and brutal refusal to include enslaved men, women, and children in its lofty declarations, promises, and self-evident truths for “all” people. The speech is often remembered for the question Douglass asked at its heart: “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?”
He responded in no uncertain terms: “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…[F]or revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”
As Douglass enumerated his personal experiences with the nation’s failures to live up to the creeds enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution in that historic speech, his language was brutally clear. Some of the questions Douglass raised that day about our “national inconsistencies” remain unanswered. But it is important to recognize that Douglass also included specific praise for the expansive vision of the nation’s founders and what the nation’s ideals are actually meant to represent, and began and ended the speech with hope that “high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny.” He said as he was closing:
“While drawing encouragement from ‘the Declaration of Independence,’ the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up, from the surrounding world, and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth . . . The fiat of the Almighty, ‘Let there be Light,’ has not yet spent its force. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light.”
Douglass saw his fierce hope for the end to the legal barbarity of slavery in America come to pass. As America begins preparations for our next Independence Day and the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding, Douglass’s words and hopes for our ultimate destiny still resonate today.