Envisioning our nation’s birthday through the eyes of Frederick Douglass

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
– Frederick Douglass

On a sultry summer’s day in 1852 a northern audience of mostly white folk, mostly women, paid 12 and a half cents admission to Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York to hear an address by a former southern slave. They got their money’s worth, and more.

Upon his birth in 1818, a black child was separated from his mother by a Baltimore Maryland slave holder, Hugh Auld, and given the name Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. Contrary to the norms of the time, Sophia Auld took it upon herself to “educate” the child, teaching him the alphabet and some simple words. The schooling, however, was halted abruptly one day when Mr. Auld vociferously informed his wife that if a slave knew how to read and write it would make him unfit to be a slave.

The child would prove the slave holder’s words to be prophetic. By the time he was 20, and after multiple attempts to escape enslavement, Frederick Bailey finally made his way to New York City on Sept. 4, 1838. He thereupon changed his last name to Douglass. Frederick Douglass, born an illiterate slave, now self educated freeman, would dedicate the rest of his life to abolishing slavery as an institution and championing the equality of all people as the greatest civil rights leader of his day. With his great gift for oratory, he was one of the most sought after speakers of his century. We Americans who remember the civil rights era might think of him as the Martin Luther King Jr. of the mid to late 1800’s.

Douglass was in Rochester upon invitation of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. It should be noted here that on July 4^th of 1827 New York State had officially abolished slavery. He chose to speak on the day following American Independence Day since New York Black communities traditionally celebrated this milestone on July 5 to avoid conflicts with white Independence Day festivities and to distinguish their own emancipation.

In an oratorical master class, Douglass proceeded to school his audience on the hypocrisy of America upon its celebration of the 4^th of July, a celebration that he nor any black person could share in. In his opening remarks after praising the founders and the Declaration of Independence, he then asked the question that laid the foundation for all that followed:
“Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?”

He went on to state the cruel truth:
“Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”

While Douglass knew he had a sympathetic “anti-slavery” audience before him on that auspicious day, he also knew that stating you were against slavery was not the same as seeking to abolish it throughout the nation. Much of the population above the Mason-Dixon line was content to stop enslavement from entering new states while tolerating its ongoing existence in southern states. As the most eloquent and passionate voice of the abolition movement, Douglass decried such complicity and complacency.

In no uncertain terms, Douglass told his audience, and subsequently the nation, what he as a black American made of the 4^th of July. “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” became one of the defining speeches of the 19^th century. And in the year of the 250^th celebration of this nation’s independence from tyranny its relevance is palpable. Even as the Declaration itself deserves our reading at this moment of democracy in crisis, so does Douglass’s timeless oration. Hear and watch portions of it being read by his own descendants HERE. And watch the full speech in this presentation, Frederick Douglass: The Meaning of July 4th for the Negro.

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“Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.”
– Frederick Douglass