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 What to the American Slave is Your Fourth of
July? by Frederick Douglass
The full article is now available as a Digital Download! The Download Also Includes The Famous Letter To My Old Master
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But, such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of
the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious
anniversary! 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 life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This
Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a
man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him
to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do
you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is
a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy
the example of a nation whose crimes, lowering up to heaven, were thrown down
by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! I
can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!
Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultous joy, I hear the
mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are,
to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I
do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow
this day, "may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to
the roof of my mouth!" To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and
to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and
shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject,
then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY...
There Is More! The full article is now available as a Digital Download! The Download Also Includes The Famous Letter To My Old Master
Available Exclusively Here For Only $1.00
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