An article in the local news today got me thinking about why and who celebrates.
"The Worcester NAACP this week will lead a community reading of an 1852 Frederick Douglass speech that that highlighted the contradiction of celebrating July 4 while millions in the U.S. were enslaved.
The reading of Douglass' "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" will happen before Worcester's main July 4 celebration on Thursday at East Park — the city's first in-person Independence Day celebration since 2019.
Now, of course we no longer have slavery, but how many find nothing to celebrate?
"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!"
Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" (article) | Khan Academy
"The Worcester NAACP this week will lead a community reading of an 1852 Frederick Douglass speech that that highlighted the contradiction of celebrating July 4 while millions in the U.S. were enslaved.
The reading of Douglass' "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" will happen before Worcester's main July 4 celebration on Thursday at East Park — the city's first in-person Independence Day celebration since 2019.
Now, of course we no longer have slavery, but how many find nothing to celebrate?
"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!"
Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" (article) | Khan Academy
