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.
- Source
- “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”, Rochester, New York, 5 July 1852
- Written
- 1852
About this quotation
Douglass gave the speech to an audience of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society on 5 July, not on the Fourth itself. He went on to call the celebration “a sham” and the nation’s boasted liberty “an unholy license”.