On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? The whole scene, as I look back to it, was simple, dignified and sublime. Make your content more accessible to people with disabilities. Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! May of Syracuse, and my esteemed friend (Rev. Frederick Douglass thought that such rationalizations were crap, and he had the right to think so. Everywhere, in this country, it is safe to speak of this foreign slave-trade, as a most inhuman traffic, opposed alike to the laws of God and of man. WebFrederick Douglass speech What to a Slave is the Fourth of July effectively argues against slavery. It is called (in contradistinction to the foreign slave-trade) the internal slave trade. It is, probably, called so, too, in order to divert from it the horror with which the foreign slave-trade is contemplated. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. 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. Cling to this day cling to it, and to its principles, with the grasp of a storm-tossed mariner to a spar at midnight. In a very telling sign, the fateful words of Frederick Douglass from a speech he delivered 170 years ago still resonate very much in 2022 as Black people in America continue the fight for the same kind of equality that the legendary abolitionist was demanding back in the mid-19th century. I answer: a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. Translated on-screen subtitles for videos. If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. WebCelebrating 200 years of Frederick Douglass. Fellow-citizens! No, I will not. The arm of the Lord is not shortened, and the doom of slavery is certain. whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. We are called upon to prove that we are men. The testimony of Senator Breese, Lewis Cass, and many others that might be named, who are everywhere esteemed as sound lawyers, so regard the constitution. It was, Milloy continued, a critique of a nation that claimed to hold dear the principles of freedom, justice and equality even as it enslaved black people.. As the sheet anchor takes a firmer hold, when the ship is tossed by the storm, so did the cause of your fathers grow stronger, as it breasted the chilling blasts of kingly displeasure. 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 4th of July. At the very moment that they are thanking God for the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty, and for the right to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences, they are utterly silent in respect to a law which robs religion of its chief significance, and makes it utterly worthless to a world lying in wickedness. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. They did so in the form of a resolution; and as we seldom hit upon resolutions, drawn up in our day whose transparency is at all equal to this, it may refresh your minds and help my story if I read it. Frederick Douglass: (10:31) His own testimony is nothing. Frederick Douglass: (01:08) The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times; but his heart may well beat lighter at the thought that America is young, and that she is still in the impressible stage of her existence. But, such is not the state of the case. Need I tell you that the Jews are not the only people who built the tombs of the prophets, and garnished the sepulchres of the righteous? Not for thieves and robbers, enemies of society, merely, but for men guilty of no crime. They felt themselves the victims of grievous wrongs, wholly incurable in their colonial capacity. As noted here, that banquet was attended by prominent African-American professional men in celebration of the twenty-first anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.After the toast provided by former Senator Blanche K. Bruce, He mentions the fact to show that slavery is in no danger. Fromwhat quarter, I beg to know, has proceeded a fire so deadly upon our ranks, during the last two years, as from the Northern pulpit? You discourse eloquently on the dignity of labor; yet, you sustain a system which, in its very essence, casts a stigma upon labor. Even Mammon seems to have quitted his grasp on this day. On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Ever ready to drink, to treat, and to gamble. They saw themselves treated with sovereign indifference, coldness and scorn. How can we sing the Lords song in a strange land? I have better employments for my time and strength than such arguments would imply. I think that, in whatever else I may be deficient, I have I trust, however, that mine will not be so considered. But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. Your fathers esteemed the English Government as the home government; and England as the fatherland. Citizens, your fathers made good that resolution. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives from your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot and kill. Is it not astonishing that while we are plowing, planting and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metal of brass, iron, copper, silver, and gold, that while we are reading, writing, and ciphering acting as clerks, merchants, and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators, and teachers that we are engaged in all the enterprises, common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific feeding sheep and cattle on the hillside, living, moving, acting, thinking, planting, living in families as husbands, wives, and children, and above all confessing and worshiping the Christian God and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave. He can bring no witnesses for himself. I must mourn. You glory in your refinement and your universal education yet you maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful as ever stained the character of a nation a system begun in avarice, supported in pride, and perpetuated in cruelty. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slaves point of view. There I see the tenderest ties ruthlessly broken, to gratify the lust, caprice and rapacity of the buyers and sellers of men. The text of Frederick Douglasss most famous speech, given in 1852, What, to a slave, is the Fourth of July? A chapter describing Douglasss early encounters with abolitionists, from his autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom, 1857. The fact that the church of our country, (with fractional exceptions), does not esteem the Fugitive Slave Law as a declaration of war against religious liberty, implies that that church regards religion simply as a form of worship, an empty ceremony, andnota vital principle, requiring active benevolence, justice, love and good will towards man. What would be thought of an instrument, drawn up, legally drawn up, for the purpose of entitling the city of Rochester to a track of land, in which no mention of land was made? But now is the time, the important time. You profess to believe that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth, and hath commanded all men, everywhere to love one another; yet you notoriously hate, (and glory in your hatred), all men whose skins are not colored like your own. They that can, may; I cannot. will be found by Americans. We thank you for taking the time to watch this community reading of Frederick Douglasss What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? Source: Blight, David. I cannot. But I fancy, I hear some of my audience say it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression upon the public mind. What is this but the acknowledgement that the slave is a moral, intellectual and responsible being? But it is answered in reply to all this, that precisely what I have now denounced is, in fact, guaranteed and sanctioned by the Constitution of the United States; that the right to hold and to hunt slaves is a part of that Constitution framed by the illustrious Fathers of this Republic. You have already declared it. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? But neither their familiar faces, nor the perfect gage I think I have of Corinthian Hall, seems to free me from embarrassment. Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? Web"The Lessons of the Hour" Speech by Frederick Douglass, January 9, 1894 Friends and Fellow Citizens : No man should come before an audience like the one by whose presence I am now honored, without a noble object and a fixed and earnest purpose. My soul sickens at the sight. The 4th of July is the first great fact in your nations history the very ring-bolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny. For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. You have no right to enjoy a childs share in the labor of your fathers, unless your children are to be blest by your labors. Mr. President, Friends and Fellow Citizens: He who could address this audience without a quailing sensation, has It would, certainly, prove nothing, as to what part I might have taken, had I lived during the great controversy of 1776. Without this right, the liberty of an American citizen would be as insecure as that of a Frenchman. The sin of which it is guilty is one of omission as well as of commission. How unlike the politicians of an hour! To do so would be to make myself ridiculous and to offer an insult to your understanding. Fully appreciating the hardship to be encountered, firmly believing in the right of their cause, honorably inviting the scrutiny of an on-looking world, reverently appealing to heaven to attest their sincerity, soundly comprehending the solemn responsibility they were about to assume, wisely measuring the terrible odds against them, your fathers, the fathers of this republic, did, most deliberately, under the inspiration of a glorious patriotism, and with a sublime faith in the great principles of justice and freedom, lay deep the corner-stone of the national superstructure, which has risen and still rises in grandeur around you. I will show you a man-drover. Build with the best speech-to-text APIs around.

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