Frederick Douglass -- "What To The Slave Is The 4th of July?" -- Full Version

[ancianita]

Full version because this speech is almost never presented in its entirety, or it's glossed over altogether, with the best parts left out.

Frederick Douglass deserves the full recognition of his humility, self-made intellectual power and courage in confronting white Americans with their horrible, structured racism, the practices later backed by the 13th Amendment, with all the presumptions of privilege whites consider "normal" to this day.

Once enslaved Blacks knew what the ratified U.S. Constitution (1789) actually said,

Frederick Douglass's speech (1852) stands next to David Walker's Appeal (1829) as official declarations of Black resistance.

The white supremacists' hunt had already begun, with dogs, whips, and guns drawn. For 170 years our fellow Americans have lived with this horror. We see it across America every day. Every single day.

Either this 232 year-old horror ends this year, or it will become the same issue for lazily indifferent white people who have brought this upon themselves. There needn't be any sympathy, any longer, for their assertions of ignorance. White people got no excuse.

Aggressive defenders of white privilege and innocence had better snap out of their fog and recognize.

As with masks, racist whites will have to literally see the collapse of their double standard bubble, and literally be trained to accept that justice and equality protect their freedom, too.

[bobbieinok]

1. Thanks for posting

[Igel]

2. What he said 25 or so years later was a bit different.

"Nothing changed" was certainly not something Douglass would have said.

[SergeStorms]

3. I think I'll stop in and see him this weekend...

his grave is in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester. Then maybe I'll take a stroll over to see Susan B. Anthony. She's there as well. I volunteered as genealogist there for a few years, helping people track down relatives for family trees etc. It was a lot of fun, but a lot of work as well. Walking among the graves of some of the nation's most prestigious movers and shakers has a humbling effect on you.

[ancianita]

4. Indeed. It's been true of American history that those movers and shakers have only been

seen as such long after they did the heavy lifting that shifted American perspectives. American history has reluctantly revised itself as the diminished finally get credit for the seers they were.

I once took my son to the Women's History museum in Rochester, and he tells me he's never forgotten what he learned there.

Americans who were ahead of their time will eventually be repositioned at the forefront of America's becoming a more perfect union. After that, slave owning, Indian killing presidents will take on a whole different meaning.

Thanks for sharing the work you've done. Your visit is a much better way to observe the holiday than joining a crowd somewhere for fireworks in honor of what's come to be a largely untrue story.

Old American mythology has got to go.

[SergeStorms]

5. How right you are.

Unfortunately the "winners" of history's conflicts get to write the books that describe those conflicts, and they're all one sided and most often wrong.

"The old American mythology must go". Truer words have never been written, but that's a battle that can take an incredible amount of time and persistence. Just look how long it's taken to rid our country of the confederate propaganda on display all over our nation. And even then we haven't destroyed it, they just moved it out of public view. Confederate lovers will still worship their traitorous "heroes" and stare lovingly at their statues in more discrete locations. Equal rights for African-Americans is still in it's infancy 250 years later.

[ancianita]

6. Trump tried to start that battle tonight at Rushmore.

This will be talked about for the whole weekend, when he intends to whip up furor over the whole country against all the George Floyd and Black Lives Matter supporters.

He intends to uplift all white supremacist slavers into a special national park of their own, which, if his wall is any preview, won't happen.

But he and his followers believe after tonight that they've thrown down the gauntlet against their fellow American "destroyers" of America.

Preserving their version of history could make this a campaign season of all heat and no light.