What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?

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What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?
Douglas Fredrick’s speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” is probably one of the historical narrations presented to reveal and criticize the future of slavery in the United States. According to Frank (99), Fredrick Douglas delivered this speech just a day before the celebration of the American Independence day of 1852. Based on my analysis of the speech, Douglas took time to address his displeasures concerning the issue of slave trade that was considered as one of the domineering economic activities in the United States. In his view, any effort of mentioning the positive statements that are considered as the bases of the United States of America’s independence such liberty, statesmanship, and freedom act as great abuses to the enslaved members of the society. Douglas Fredrick reveals that “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” ( Douglas 1820). Considering the fact that Douglas Fredrick was addressing an audience of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society in the Corinth Hall that was only dominated by the whites, the tone of the words used reveals the fact that the slaves and minority members of the American society were treated with higher degrees of malice and had nothing to celebrate during the independence day.
In my view, Douglas does not see any significant change in the state of slavery at the time when he was delivering the speech and the period when the country was under the rule of its British colonizers. According to Baszile (239), Douglas does not only put a lot of emphasis on the state of captivity in which the minority members of the United States such as the Blacks are forced to live but also the exploitations and torturous moments they are forced to endure in the post-colonial era. Douglas reveals that, “above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do no...