Wednesday 4 July 2012

Frederick Douglass (14?/2/1818 - 20/2/1895) - What to the Slave is Your Fourth of July?


" 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 gestures, 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 hypocricy- 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 the United States, at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and depotisms 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 everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me , that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocricy, America reigns without a rival."

1852

Danny Glover reading from Frederick Douglass's speech , 5/10/05, L.A



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