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What, to the American, Is This Fourth of July?

A callback to Frederick Douglass, 174 years later

By Shawnee Calhoun | Scarlett's Media

July 4, 2026 | Memphis, TN

3D animated illustration of a Black woman writer at a lamplit desk writing a letter as a translucent Frederick Douglass sits across from her

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.”

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.

📌 Community Resources & Links

NAACP TN State Conference Martyrs’ Day Virtual Panel — Sunday, July 5, at 5 p.m. CST; free registration via Eventbrite. Panelists include attorney Walter Bailey Jr., who represented Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike.
MartyrsDay.us — Learn about the martyrs, download educational toolkits, and bring the observance to your own community.
“What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” — Full Text — Read Frederick Douglass’ complete 1852 address.
NPR: Douglass’ Descendants Read His Speech — Watch five of his descendants read and respond to his words.

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Saturday, July 4, 2026