They hate all changes, but silver, gold and copper change! Not everyone. There was, at that time, a grand slave mart kept at the head of Pratt Street, by Austin Woldfolk. To the slave, Douglass tells the audience, "your 4th of July is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license [for enslaving blacks] . Senator Berrien tell us that the Constitution is the fundamental law, that which controls all others. Must we allow symbols of racism on public land? Seventy-six years, though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation. Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? Great Britain, and many other countries of that time, had already abolished slavery from its territories. [16][17] Finally, the Act did not allow the accused individual of defending themselves in court. If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. welcome atheism! But its quite another to change the way you see yourself and to grow into a person deeply committed to long-term interracial coalition building. Mr. President, Friends and Fellow Citizens: He who could address this audience without a quailing sensation, has stronger nerves than I have. He had delivered a series of seven lectures about slavery there in the winter of 185051. What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? They, however, gradually flow back to the same old channel, and flow on as serenely as ever. The right of the hunter to his prey stands superior to the right of marriage, and to all rights in this republic, the rights of God included! Frederick Douglass, circa 1879. You may rejoice, I must mourn. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light. Douglass then discusses the internal slave trade in America. He says that, if anything, many churches actually stand behind slavery and support the continued existence of the institution. In several states, this trade is a chief source of wealth. that gash on her shoulder tells her to move on. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. That point is conceded already. YOUR HANDS ARE FULL OF BLOOD; cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment; relieve the oppressed; judge for the fatherless; plead for the widow.The American church is guilty, when viewed in connection with what it is doing to uphold slavery; but it is superlatively guilty when viewed in connection with its ability to abolish slavery. See, too, that girl of thirteen, weeping, yes! dismay. This year is pretty challenging in the wake of COVID-19, and the event is going to be held online instead of before a live audience like we did last year. The Oratory of Fr. He wrote a glowing letter of encouragement to Harriet Tubman, which served as the preface to Sarah Bradfords 1869 biography about Tubmans life. ROY: The better we get to know the people that we live with, that we work around, that we see at the coffee shop, and the more we talk about these important racial issues with one another, the easier it will be to heal our divided communities. The Act also denied suspected slaves trial by jury or even the ability to testify on their own behalf in court. Is slavery among them? Douglass details the hardships past Americans once endured when they were members of British colonies and validates their feelings of ill treatment. I have better employments for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.What, then, remains to be argued? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? Everywhere, in this country, it is safe to speak of this foreign slave-trade, as a most inhuman traffic, opposed alike to the laws of God and of man. speaking of it relatively, and positively, negatively, and affirmatively. To find out what elements make the speech 'What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?' Wells, which was incorporated into the preface of her 1892 pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.. In this collection, students will review the life of Frederick Douglass and learn about one of his most famous speeches, "The Meaning of Fourth of July for the Negro" (it is also commonly referred to as "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July). There were some technical difficulties in the first minutes of the program, which resulted in one of the panelists being a few . We are met on the threshold of our efforts for the redemption of the slave, by the church and ministry of the country, in battle arrayed against us; and we are compelled to fight or flee. nor the perfect gage I think I have of Corinthian Hall, the slave plantation, from which I escaped, and trusting to your patient and generous indulgence, I will proceed to lay them before you, This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. Noble men may be found, scattered all over these Northern States, of whom Henry Ward Beecher of Brooklyn, Samuel J. 2. For black men there are neither law, justice, humanity, not religion. Their opposition to the then dangerous thought was earnest and powerful; but, amid all their terror and affrighted vociferations against it, the alarming and revolutionary idea moved on, and the country with it. [10] Douglass had spoken at Corinthian Hall in the past. You may rejoice, I must mourn. There are exceptions, and I thank God that there are. They are food for the cotton-field, and the deadly sugar-mill. He talks about how Americans are proud of their country and their religion and how they rejoice in the name of freedom and liberty and yet they do not offer those things to millions of their country's residents. From what quarter, I beg to know, has proceeded a fire so deadly upon our ranks, during the last two years, as from the Northern pulpit? An American judge gets ten dollars for every victim he con signs to slavery, and five, when he fails to do so. The crack you heard, was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard, was from the woman you saw with the babe. Frederick Douglass delivered his famous speech at the Corinthian Hall in Rochester, NY, on July. Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains! I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! They perambulate the country, and crowd the highways of the nation, with droves of human stock. There is consolation in the thought that America is young. Over 150,000 persons were sold between 1820 and 1830, and over 300,000 were sold between 1850 and 1860.[15]. was delivered in the decade preceding the American Civil War, which lasted from 1861 to 1865 and achieved the abolition of slavery. [12], According to the 1850 Census, there were around 3.2 million enslaved persons in the United States. [5], A statue of Douglass erected in Rochester in 2018 was torn down on July 5, 2020the 168th anniversary of the speech. The power is co-extensive with the Star-Spangled Banner and American Christianity. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? There, the question of emancipation was a high religious question. Were not only going to be reading books like White Fragility, and Divided by Faith, but were also going to read and watch a number of speeches by Martin Luther King Jr., and documentaries like 13th and King in the Wilderness, as we try to get at the root of racial division so we can come together to remove it. His agents were sent into every town and county in Maryland, announcing their arrival, through the papers, and on flaming hand-bills, headed CASH FOR NEGROES. Yet this is but a glance at the American slave-trade, as it exists, at this moment, in the ruling part of the United States. The anguish of my boyish heart was intense; and I was often consoled, when speaking to my mistress in the morning, to hear her say that the custom was very wicked; that she hated to hear the rattle of the chains, and the heart-rending cries. sanction. During the Civil War, Douglass said that since Massachusetts had been the first state to join the Patriot cause during the American Revolutionary War, black men should go to Massachusetts to enlist in the Union Army. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. In the end, Douglass wants to keep his hope and faith in humanity high. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future. Text Frederick Douglass, " What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? You shed tears over fallen Hungary, and make the sad story of her wrongs the theme of your poets, statesmen and orators, till your gallant sons are ready to fly to arms to vindicate her cause against her oppressors; but, in regard to the ten thousand wrongs of the American slave, you would enforce the strictest silence, and would hail him as an enemy of the nation who dares to make those wrongs the subject of public discourse! It fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement, the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet, you cling to it, as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes. You declare, before the world, and are understood by the world to declare, that you hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that, among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose, a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country.Fellow-citizens! You discourse eloquently on the dignity of labor; yet, you sustain a system which, in its very essence, casts a stigma upon labor. The speech notes the contradiction of the national ethos of United States and the way enslaved persons are treated. Douglass believed that slavery could be eliminated with the support of the church, and also with the reexamination of what the Bible was actually saying. Americans! But the 1852 "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" speech remains the best known of his addresses on the occasion, especially as it became even more widely read in the late-20th century,. The Fugitive Slave Law makes mercy to them a crime; and bribes the judge who tries them. You profess to believe that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth, and hath commanded all men, everywhere to love one another; yet you notoriously hate, (and glory in your hatred), all men whose skins are not colored like your own. Genius is the ultimate source of music knowledge, created by scholars like you who share facts and insight about the songs and artists they love. They went so far in their excitement as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submitted to. Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men; but nations number their years by thousands. That bolt drawn, that chain broken, and all is lost. Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers. By an act of the American Congress, not yet two years old, slavery has been nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form. The timid and the prudent (as has been intimated) of that day, were, of course, shocked and alarmed by it. But, with that blindness which seems to be the unvarying characteristic of tyrants, since Pharaoh and his hosts were drowned in the Red Sea. Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. 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. [Throughout the speech] Douglass looks at the contradictions between the reality of slavery and the lofty claims of a just society outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. 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