5

OverviewTranscribeVersionsHelp

Facsimile

Transcription

Status: Complete

What, to the American slave, is your Fouth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all the other days of the year the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, unholy liscence; your national greatness, swelling vanity; you 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, with all you religious parade and solemity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and hypocristy: - a thin veil to cover up crime which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on earth guilty of crimes more shocking and bloody than are the people ofthe United States at this very hours.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchs and despotisms 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 every-day practices of this nation and you will say with me that for revolting a barbarity and shameless hopocrisy, America reigns withour a rival.

********

Frederick Douglas, July 5, 1852

Notes and Questions

Please sign in to write a note for this page

Princess1

page 5 is duplicate of previous page