Malu 'Aina

Remembering The Greatest 4th Of July Speech Of All Time

by Frederick Douglass

What to the Slave (and the Native American and Native Hawaiian and many people living under U.S. bombs and regime change throughout the world) is the Fourth of July?

Here is one vivid paragraph:

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all 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 unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.”

Read the full speech here

https://www.popularresistance.org/remembering-the-greatest-4th-of-july-speech-of-all-time/

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