Frederick Douglass' Fourth of July Speech Is Still a Must-Read

On July 1st , 1852, the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society took out an advertisement in Frederick Douglass’ Paper for a “Celebration of the National Anniversary.” The event, scheduled for July 5 at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, boasted speeches from prominent abolitionists as well as a headlining address from the namesake of the paper himself. If the irony of inviting a former slave to speak at an occasion billed as a "celebration" of a nation still practicing slavery was lost on the Ladies Society, it was not lost on Douglass. His polemic would be one for the ages.

Douglass’ speech, commonly titled “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July”, comprised over 10,000 words, each a carefully chosen dagger aimed at the United States, what Douglass referred to as “your country.”

“Fellow-citizens,” Douglass said in his address, “Pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence?”

The abolitionist answered himself with characteristic rhetorical ferocity: “The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me,” concluding, “This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine.”

While an enduring classic of American oratory, Douglass’ speech exhibits only a sliver of the decades-long career of one of America’s best-known abolitionists. In fact, Douglass would conduct his activism across a variety of platforms, including as a writer, editor, and even as a politician. Moreover, in addition to publishing three full-length autobiographies, numerous editorials, a novella, establishing and producing one of the nation’s first successful black newspapers, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and holding official positions in the United States government, Douglass was a tireless advocate of his views and his cause. The abolitionist did not simply espouse radical ideas; he took them around the world, delivering speeches across the U.S. and promoting his work from the streets of Glasgow to the pyramids of Giza.

He was also a human being, who lived an extremely complex life. And so to better understand the Douglass you may not have learned from the history books, Teen Vogue spoke with historians David W. Blight, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Sarah Lewis, as well as poet M. Nzadi Keita. Here’s what you need to know.

Douglass was the most photographed person of the 19th Century.

Among the famous figures of his day, Douglass knew the power of the image most acutely and used it most extensively. As Professor Lewis tells Teen Vogue, “Douglass felt that photography’s democratic function and liberatory possibilities could upend the stereotypes about black life that circulated as freely as air. It is no surprise to me that Douglass is the most photographed American man in the 19th century for that reason – his very body, posture, and self-possession became a refutation, a counter-narrative about the civic narratives of black life.”

Douglass professed striking racism toward indigenous peoples in America.

Despite being a staunch abolitionist, Douglass used a kind of racialized othering against indigenous peoples similar to what white supremacists had used against him. In an 1866 speech titled “We Are Here and Want The Ballot-Box,” Douglass spoke to a Philadelphia audience regarding the differences between black Americans and what he called “the Indian.”

In one particularly brutal section, the abolitionist said, “There is no resemblance in the elements that go to make up the character of a civilized man between the Indian and the negro…[the Indian] sees the ploughshare of your civilization tossing up the bones of his venerated fathers, and he retreats before the onward progress of your civilization…he abhors your fashions, he refuses to adopt them. But not so with the negro.”

“Douglass is saying that in a context of exulting the place of black people in the United States as true Americans and as modern people. It sounds kind of brutally conservative in a way: What he’s really doing is he’s exulting the place of blacks [by] saying, ‘We deserve all these rights because we’re not fleeing into anything,’” Professor Blight tells Teen Vogue.

Douglass and his contemporaries anticipated contemporary America’s issues with mass incarceration.

Douglass was prophetic in foreseeing one of modern America’s most glaring problems — mass incarceration. As Professor Gates tells Teen Vogue, “He predicted what we now call mass incarceration by criticizing the convict lease system in 1893 in his pamphlet, “The Reason Why the Colored American is not in the World’s Columbian Exposition,” in which he and Ida B. Wells criticized the convict lease system, which basically stipulated that southern municipalities could just round up black men, arrest them, and then lease out their labor.”

“He recognized that that was a problem even then,” Professor Gates says.

As an activist, Douglass was an adamant supporter of women’s rights. But he was less of an enthusiastic feminist in his personal life.

“Though the term [‘feminism’] wasn’t around then,” Professor Blight says, “Douglass called himself, ‘A women’s rights advocate.’ He titled a piece, “I’m a women’s rights man.” From Seneca Falls on, he’s an advocate of women’s suffrage.”

As Douglass wrote in his third and final autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, “In a word, I have never yet been able to find one consideration, one argument, or suggestion in favor of man’s right to participate in civil government which did not equally apply to the right of woman.”

But Keita says Douglass’ treatment in his work of his wife of more than 40 years, Anna Murray Douglass, made her doubt the extent to which the abolitionist’s public display of feminism extended to his home life. Keita’s work on Anna’s life, Brief Evidence of Heaven, helped her better understand her main subject. Upon reading Douglass’ Life and Times, Keita tells Teen Vogue, “Anna died in 1882. I read the section in Life and Times over and over. I kept saying, ‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait. I must’ve missed something. Are there some pages missing in my book?’ Just to make sure, I went back to an earlier section and read through into the 1880s, and he never mentioned her death.”

In his nearly 500-page autobiography, Douglass mentions Anna, the woman who helped him escape slavery, who kept his home and managed his finances for more than 40 years of marriage, who was a mother to his five children and a grandmother to his 21 grandchildren, just a single time. And he doesn’t even call her by her name, instead referring to her as “his intended wife.”

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