Frederick Douglass on fourth of July
Frederick Douglass talks about the fourth of July, which was the Independence Day of the United States, of how happy people usually are on that glorious anniversary. He does not take part in celebrating the Independence Day as he says that, the justice, independence, liberty and prosperity are inherited by the noble ones and not the ordinary people. He hears the morning of people, who suffered then and are not intolerance with the happy shouts.
He sees the day, fourth of July, in a slave point of view, as the past declarations and the present professions of the nation and its conduct and characteristics are disgusting and unsightly. He talks of how he will, in the name of the bible, constitution, liberty and humanity, that are ignored and encroached, use the severest words to adjure that everything that continues slavery as irreverence and ignominy of America. “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse”.
He says that slave is a man and the slaveholders acknowledged it in the laws of their government. They punished insubordination on the part of slave. There are seventy-two crimes of which when a black man commits one of those, he is subjected to death punishment, while only two of them when committed by a white man, he will be subjected to the same sentence. In this present day, the negro race’s equal rights should be affirmed.
He says that the fourth of July is a day to remind an American of the injustice and cruelty of which he was a victim. That, to him, the celebration is sham, heartless and empty, mockery, hypocrisy and fraud. The ceremony covers up crimes that will shame the nation of savages.