In jail, Mrs. Mallory slams July 4 celebrations as 'sham'
p.19

In jail, Mrs. Mallory slams July 4 celebrations as 'sham'
p.19

"CLEVELAND, Ohio- Now that the Fourth of July celebrations are over the fire-crackers have fizzled out and even the yelling has stopped.
I wonder if half the Americans really know what they were celebrating. Do they know that the first man to give his life of the independence of this country was a black man, Crispus Attucks?
Non-whites are still refugees in this land, their lives worth only the whim of the white man.
Frederick Douglass made the following speech July 4, 1835, exactly 109 years ago. The situation has not changed one iota.
“WHAT TO THE American slave is your 4th of July? I answer: A day that reveals to him more than other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.
“To him, your celebration is a sham: your boasted liberty, an un-holy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing, empty and heartless:
“Your denounciations[sic] of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence: your shouts of liberty, and equality, a hollow mockery: your prayers and hymns, your sermons and all your religious parades and solemnity;
“ALL TO HIM are mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and hypo-cracy[sic] - ta thin veil to cover up crime which would disgrace a nation of savages…
“You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole po-litical[sic] power of the nation.... Is sol-emnly[sic] pledged to support and per-petuate[sic] the enslavement of millions of your countrymen.
“You hurt your anathemas at the crown-head tyrants of RUssia and Austria, and pride yourselves on your democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be mere tools and bodyguards of tyrants of Virginia and Carolina.
“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 on them like water:
“But the fugitives from your own land, you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot and kill.
You glory in your refinement and your universal education, yet you maintain a system as babarous[sic] and dreadful as ever stained the character of a naion - a system begun in avarices, supported in pride, and perpetuated in cruelty.
“YOU SHED TEARS over fallen Hungary, and make he sad story of her wrongs the theme of your poets, statesmen and orators till your gallant sons are ready to fly to arms to vindicate her cause against the oppressor:
“But, in regards to the ten thousand wrongs of the American slave, you would enforce he strictest silence, and hail him as a ememy[sic] of the nation who dares to make those wrongs the subject of public discourse.”"

Mrs. Mae Mallory

Baltimore Afro-American

1962-7-21