On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass gave his speech, “The Meaning of the Fourth of July to the Negro,” which contained this passage:
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.
Twelve years later, and 150 years ago this Fourth of July, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman was rectifying some of that harsh criticism by forcing back the armies of those in the South who committed treason in defense of slavery. On the Fourth of July in 1864, Joe Johnston was retreating back behind the Chattahoochee River, the last major defensive obstacle before Sherman would reach Atlanta.
We, as a nation, have certainly had some growing pains when it has come to realizing the ideals our Founders called self-evident and have struggled mightily at times to secure rights for our citizens, an ironic thing when those rights are described as “inalienable.” But, I hope, our efforts in this regard have been more forward than back. And the Fourth is a time to reflect on the remarkable amount of good our country has achieved over the last two hundred and thirty-eight years.
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