In this famous speech, Douglass says:
“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 greatness, swelling vanity;
your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants
brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery;
your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, 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. 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.”
Actor Danny Glover reads abolitionist Frederick Douglass's "Fourth of July Speech, 1852" on October 5, 2005 in Los Angeles, California. Part of a reading from Voices of a People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove.)
