■ Opinion & Editorial
What, to the American, Is This Fourth of July?
A callback to Frederick Douglass, 174 years later
Caption: A writer pens a letter to Frederick Douglass. | Credit:
AI-generated image via Google Gemini
On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass stood in Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New
York, and asked a question this country has spent 174 years refusing to
answer:
“What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”
He had been invited to speak on the Fourth. He spoke on the fifth instead,
because he would not sing in the temple of a liberty that held his people in
chains. “This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of
July,” he told the crowd. “It is the birthday of your National
Independence, and of your political freedom.”
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Your independence. Your freedom. Douglass chose his pronouns like a marksman.
And reading his words this week, on the eve of America’s 250th birthday,
I felt the marksman’s aim land on the present tense. His speech
resonates as if he wrote it this morning, filed it before deadline, and
scheduled it to post at sunrise. The Fourth of July is still yours.
Martyrs’ Day, its day-after reckoning, is ours.
Douglass was gracious to the founders — more gracious than they deserved
and more gracious than I intend to be. He called them “statesmen,
patriots and heroes,” men who “preferred revolution to peaceful
submission to bondage.” But he also warned the sons that they had no
right to wear out their fathers’ hard-earned fame to cover their own
laziness. He watched men shout “We have Washington to our father”
while trading in human flesh, and he reminded them what the marble monuments
left out. In Douglass’ time, we had slave owners for presidents;
Washington went to his grave still trying to recapture Ona Judge, the young woman who dared to free herself from his household.
So what would Douglass see today? He would not need a new speech. He would
only need new names.
The residue of the plantation
Slavery has divested from the whip and the auction block, but its residue
remains — in the systemic limitations that keep Black families from
affording property for housing and farming, in the redlined maps that never
really got unrolled, in
Black-owned farmland that dropped by 90 percent over the course of a
century. Douglass said the slave was denied the fruits of his own labor. Today the
descendants of the enslaved are denied the inheritance of it.
Douglass described families torn apart at the auction block — the girl
of thirteen “weeping as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been
torn.” Today, non-white immigrants and their children are
placed in camps and cages, waiting on forced deportations to countries that, in many cases, are not
their homelands and never were. The practice of separating families continues
by another ledger, too: now they separate the vote,
carving up the districts where Black people live the most, so that a community’s voice arrives at the Capitol pre-shredded.
Douglass thundered that the church of his country had made itself “the
bulwark of American slavery.” He asked how a religion of mercy could
bless the man-hunter. I ask a cousin of his question: do today’s white
Christian nationalists not see that they have become an evolution of what
Douglass called “the tyranny of England towards the American
Colonies”? They have made themselves this country’s modern-day
British Crown — taxing conscience, licensing worship, and calling
obedience patriotism. The irony would be laughable if it were not armed.
The present, 2026
“My business, if I have any here today, is with the present,”
Douglass said. Very well. To the present.
This Fourth of July, we watch millionaires and billionaires treat the federal
treasury like a private account — public money flowing toward private
fortunes while the public is told to tighten its belt. We watch
the People’s House torn open
and remodeled to the taste of one man. Just weeks ago, we watched
human beings offered up as fight-night fodder on the White House lawn, as if we have regressed to the age of gladiators — who were, in their
time, slaves who lived or died at the pleasure of their emperor. Douglass
called the nation’s spectacle “swelling vanity.” He never
saw a cage match staged where Lincoln once walked, but he would have
recognized the arena instantly.
In Douglass’ time, the presidency belonged to enslavers. Today it
belongs to a man of the illest repute: a
documented friend of this country’s most notorious convicted sex
offender; a man of cross language toward women, children, and the disabled; a
landlord the Justice Department once sued for refusing to rent to Black
families; the
grandson of an immigrant who fled the military draft in his own homeland
— a standard the grandson honored with
five draft deferments of his own. Behind him stands a Congress made of loyalists and an electoral college of
the same cloth. Douglass said the nation’s politicians were corrupted at
home and stripped of moral power abroad. The man never missed.
And the press? Douglass built his freedom on a printing press; he knew the
word was a weapon the powerful fear most. Today, freedom of speech grows
scarce for reporters whose stories refuse to capitulate to the
president’s ego —
credentials revoked and access rationed over a single word choice, newsrooms sued into silence. A country that punishes truth-telling has
confessed what it is afraid of.
So I ask, as he asked
What, to the American of today, is the Fourth of July, in the face of the
dangling rubber carrot of “rights and freedoms” that all people
cannot fully access?
What is it to the homeless man lying in the doorway of an abandoned building
in Nashville, across the street from a five-star hotel? To the veteran in the
wheelchair instead of the VA hospital, waiting on the healthcare he already
paid for in service? To the unhoused living in parks across from abandoned
churches, or beside the playground? To the family barely making rent without
help from elders who were supposed to be resting from work by now, not
financing their grandchildren’s survival?
What is it to the children who have the right to read — but not from the
literature that tells the full truth of this nation’s white history,
because
those books are banned from their school libraries? This country went from banning Black people to banning everybody —
from the truth. Douglass reminded his audience that Southern law books once
made it a crime to teach the enslaved to read. The law books have new language
now, and the old purpose.
What is it to communities abandoned financially, where the bus routes that
carried people to work and to hospitals have been cut? To cities sitting on a
housing crisis they refuse to solve, declining to renovate neighborhoods if
renovation means Black people might return? And did I mention that we watched
food assistance for families held hostage in a budget standoff, while
stockpiles of food aid were left to spoil in warehouses
rather than feed the hungry? Douglass said the American church valued
“sacrifice above mercy.” So, it turns out, does the American
budget.
Douglass answered his own question, and his answer needs no update: a day that
reveals, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty
to which the excluded are the constant victims. To them, the celebration is a
sham; the boasted liberty, an unholy license; the shouts of liberty and
equality, hollow mockery.
And yet — hope is much needed
Here is the part of the speech the memes leave out: Douglass refused despair.
“There is hope in the thought, and hope is much needed, under the dark
clouds which lower above the horizon,” he said, and he asked whether
“high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give
direction to her destiny.” He compared this nation’s fight to the
life cycle of a river — rising in wrath, flooding, receding, but capable
of drying up entirely if it forgets its source. I confess I feel the
“shrouded gloom” he warned of, and I suspect a majority of us do,
because the country is 174 years older with the same ailments. But Douglass
was 76 years into the American experiment and still declared, “I do not
despair of this country.” I am 250 years in. I can match his
stubbornness.
To be clear: Douglass was not founding a holiday that day in Rochester. He was
delivering a speech — an indictment, a warning, and a prayer. The
holiday came 174 years later, built deliberately on his foundation. This year,
author and legal historian Gloria J. Browne-Marshall established
Martyrs’ Day, a new national day of remembrance observed each July 5
— the date chosen in direct tribute to Douglass — honoring the
activists, protesters, and everyday people who gave their lives in the ongoing
struggle for justice and equality in America. Douglass told his audience that
“pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude” prompted them to
celebrate their fathers and hold them in perpetual remembrance. Fine. We claim
the same right. Martyrs’ Day allows us to mourn, acknowledge,
appreciate, and hold in perpetual remembrance the lives of our predecessors
— the ones whose signatures on this country’s contract were signed
in life and blood.
“Change is possible, change is probable, and … there’s
hope.”
— Isidore Dharma Douglass Skinner, descendant of Frederick Douglass
Douglass’ descendants — five of his great-great-great- and
great-great-great-great-grandchildren —
read his words aloud for NPR. Among them was Isidore Dharma Douglass Skinner — 15 years old then,
21 now — who called pessimism a tool of white oppression and offered the
words above, worth carrying into this weekend. So light your fireworks on the
Fourth if you must. But meet me on the fifth — the day Douglass claimed,
the day the martyrs are named — and bring the question with you: what,
to the American, is the Fourth of July? Until every one of us can answer it
without flinching, the speech stays current. And so do we.
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Editor's Note
This is an opinion & editorial piece. Factual assertions are linked to
their sources throughout. The featured image was AI-generated via Google
Gemini at the author’s direction. — Shawnee Calhoun,
Editor-in-Chief, Scarlett's Media.
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