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Over the course of five lessons, students will read, analyze, and gain a clear understanding of the speech Frederick Douglass delivered on July 5, 1852, in which he asked, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” The first four lessons require students to read excerpts from the speech “like a detective.” Through summary organizers, practice, and discussion, they will master What to the Slave is the Fourth of July, also known as the “Fourth of July Speech” is a public oratory piece Frederick Douglass gave at the Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York on an invitation by the Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society on July 5, 1852, to celebrate 76 years of the American independence. What to the American slave is your Fourth of July! 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. On July 5, 1852, eminent African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass delivered a brilliant speech to nearly six hundred people filling Rochester, New York’s Corinthian Hall, as organized by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Sewing Society. In July of 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered a speech titled “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” a call for the promise of liberty be applied equally to all Americans. What to the American slave is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. What to the American slave is your Fourth of July! 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. Douglass opens his speech by introducing himself to the crowd and discussing the Fourth of July. He describes the holiday as the anniversary of America’s freedom and reflects on how the country’s young age means that it still has the potential to either become a great nation or wither away. From there, he discusses the Revolutionary War, highlighting how the Founding Fathers succeeded by Audiobook - full reading of the historical speech - What To The Slave Is The Fourth of July? by Frederick Douglass from July 5, 1852. Recording by The Progressing America Project.more On July 5, 1852, eminent African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass delivered a brilliant speech that was a powerful indictment of American slavery and racism. Read the speech as printed within days in his own newspaper. It became one of Douglass’s most famous speeches—criticizing the chasm between America’s Founding principles and the institution of slavery. In the speech, Douglass lamented that Independence Day wasn’t a day of celebration for enslaved people. 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. 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 sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants For freed blacks and slaves, the fourth of July is not a day of independence; rather, it is a day that highlights the hypocrisy, injustices, and cruelty of a nation that claims that “all men are created equal.” 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. What is now known as the "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" speech was delivered on July 5, 1852 as an address to the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society in Rochester, New York. Within the now-famous address is what historian Philip S. Foner has called "probably the most moving passage in all of Douglass' speeches." What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? 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. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. Douglass delivered this speech before a crowd in Rochester, NY on July 5, 1852. The poem at the end was written by famed abolitionist and colleague William Lloyd Garrison, and published on March 17, 1845 in the Signal of Liberty an anti-slavery newspaper. Corinthian Hall to hear Douglass give a Fourth of July address on 5 July 1852. Douglass, who spoke at the invitation of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, spent a great deal of time preparing this speech. “I have been en gaged in writing a Speech,” he wrote Gerrit Smith on 7 July 1852, “for the 4th.
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