WHAT TO THE SLAVE IS THE FOURTH OF JULY? By Frederick Douglass
Extract from an Oration, at Rochester, July 5, 1852
Fellow-Citizens-Pardon me, and allow me to ask, why am I called upon to
national independence? Are the great principles of
speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your
political freedom and of natural justice, embodied
extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits, and express in that Declaration of Independence,
devout gratitude for the blessings, resulting from your independence to us?
But, such is not the state of the case. I
say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. Iam 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, 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? . ..
Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday,
are CO-
day rendered more'intolerable by the jubilant 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 reproach
before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the
slave's point of view. Standing there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my
soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July. Whether we turn to the declarations
of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting.
Which sentence from the text most directly states Douglass's main point? (5 points)