What to the slave is your Fourth of July?

The Fourth of July is America’s Independence Day, one of the most important dates in the nation’s calendar. It is a day when myth and hypocrisy collide.

In 1852 Frederick Douglass (above), the self educated former slave and towering champion of the country’s abolitionist movement, was invited to deliver the keynote address at an event organised by a local anti-slavery society. The speech he delivered — later titled ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?’ — amounted to a searing indictment of the rank hypocrisy, which then and now describes this annual celebration to mark the country’s Declaration of Independence from the British crown in 1776.

Douglass:

“What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him, more than all the 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 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…