What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?

by Amanda Kloer

categories: Historical Slavery, Human Trafficking in the US

Published July 04, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT

The Potomac River is a time machine.  The city of Washington which surrounds it is a modern city, dripping with Starbucks cold, tall buildings, but the Potomac belongs to an earlier era.  When you sit on its banks and watch the water ripple, it's impossible not to feel nostalgic patriotism.  Close your eyes and you can see the boats carrying goods to trade and hear the musket fire of a distant revolution and feel connected to those people who died to make the country possible.  The Potomac reminds me why I love America.    

Yet every 4^th of July, I am also reminded of what I don't love about America and what I'd like to change: that over 150 years after it was officially abolished, we still have slaves in America.  In 1852, Fredrick Douglas issued his famous (if slightly depressing and anti-American at times) speech What To a Slave is the 4^th of July.  The following is an excerpt:

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 cruelly 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 sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, 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 these United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies 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 everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

Perhaps today, one could argue, America is rivaled and surpassed in cruelty, in slavery, and in oppression.  But the fact remains that America is better than slavery.  It has been and will continue to be.  But we must be the ones who make slavery history.

This 4^th of July, you may be celebrating.  Great. Have fun and be safe.  But also consider taking a few moments to take action in the name of freedom and to help us achieve Mr. Douglas' dream and the dream of so many others: an America untainted by slavery.

This 4^th of July, shouldn't we all be free?