FRIDAY, JULY 4, 1919: THE FOURTH OF JULY, p.4
Dublin Core
Title
FRIDAY, JULY 4, 1919: THE FOURTH OF JULY, p.4
Description
"What to the American Slave is the Fourth of July? 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 a constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy liscense, your national greatness a 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 parades and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisy… a thin vein to cover up crimes, that would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody that are the people if these United States at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam thru all the monarchies and despotism of the Old World, travel thru 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 rival.
This part of the speech of the great Frederick Douglass delivered in Rochester, N. Y., July 4th, 1852 on the subject, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July” might be as fitting applied to the America today as to the slave holding America of the sixty nine years ago. Slavery is still slavery although in theory all men are free.
Until such a time as the Declaration of Independence can mean something beside mere words to the Negro in Maryland, so far as the Negro is concerned, the celebration of Independence day is to him all that Frederick Douglass said of it.
To the Negro the Fourth of July in Maryland is just a holiday, nothing more. The safe and sane celebration will claim the attention of some thousands, who will make use of the opportunity to get out into the great out-of-doors where the children can run and play and the grown folks take their ease
Today the Fourth of July is a holiday not a celebration."
Go where you may, search where you will, roam thru all the monarchies and despotism of the Old World, travel thru 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 rival.
This part of the speech of the great Frederick Douglass delivered in Rochester, N. Y., July 4th, 1852 on the subject, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July” might be as fitting applied to the America today as to the slave holding America of the sixty nine years ago. Slavery is still slavery although in theory all men are free.
Until such a time as the Declaration of Independence can mean something beside mere words to the Negro in Maryland, so far as the Negro is concerned, the celebration of Independence day is to him all that Frederick Douglass said of it.
To the Negro the Fourth of July in Maryland is just a holiday, nothing more. The safe and sane celebration will claim the attention of some thousands, who will make use of the opportunity to get out into the great out-of-doors where the children can run and play and the grown folks take their ease
Today the Fourth of July is a holiday not a celebration."
Creator
N/A
Publisher
Baltimore Afro-American
Date
1919-7-4
Collection
Citation
N/A, “FRIDAY, JULY 4, 1919: THE FOURTH OF JULY, p.4,” African American Fourth of July, accessed April 28, 2024, https://africanamerican4th.omeka.net/items/show/117.