What's July 4 To The Slave?

Few people could do justice to a Frederick Douglass speech quite like Hollywood actor James Earl Jones, fellow talented orator. In this video, he reads the historic address, ‘What to the slave is your 4th of July,’ during a 5th July 2004 performance of Voices of a People's History of the United States. Douglass had initially used it to address the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society in 1852 in New York.

In the speech, Douglass chastises the United States' biggest holiday, the Fourth of July, a day marking US independence from Britain. Despite the Declaration of Independence being predicated upon ‘equality of men,' Africans remained slaves until 1865. What freedom then, Douglass asks, is there to celebrate?

Frederick Douglass was born in 1818 on a plantation owned by then Maryland governor and US senator Edward Lloyd V. He escaped at age 20, and dedicated his life to fighting for abolition of slavery. He was a dedicated reader and powerful orator. He wrote hundreds of essays, a novela, three autobiographies and thousands of speeches.

When the civil war broke, Douglass lobbied President Lincoln to free and arm all enslaved Africans. ‘End slavery right now. Free them and arm them. They know the South far better than anyone else.’ It is argued that had Lincoln’s administration heeded the advice earlier, the war would have been concluded sooner.

Douglass' words, like many other ancestors', ring as true today as it did then. The United States is still divided along racial lines. Africans in the United States are disenfranchised economically, with the average African household being 10 times less wealthy than their white counterparts. The gap is only widening. Africans are also overrepresented in the US prison system, with the legacy of the CIA-run crack epidemic playing a part. Yet, Donald Trump successfully ran in 2016 for US president on the 'Make America Great Again' platform. What then, as Douglass asked, is the 4th of July to a slave.

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