8/12/2023 0 Comments Frederick douglass freedom quotes![]() ![]() He learned to read and escaped to become one of America’s greatest orators. (Photo, public domain)įrederick Douglass (1818-1895), was born on a Maryland plantation as a slave. ![]() That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants," Douglass said in a speech in Boston in 1860. " Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thought and opinions has ceased to exist. He believed that the right to free speech and assembly - rights ensured by the First Amendment - were essential in abolishing slavery in the United States. “It’s the birth of American Independence, the birth of a nation, and what the speech is saying is you must destroy first what you created and remake it, or it will be destroyed - and you with it,” says Blight.Frederick Douglass was a former slave who became one of America's greatest orators. “He does some of his greatest writing in early 1850s during this terrible personal crisis,” Blight says, “and right there in the middle of it comes the greatest speech he’s ever delivered, of the hundreds of speeches he delivered in his life.” He had it printed immediately after delivering it and then went out on the road and sold it for 50 cents a copy or $6 for a hundred. The message wasn’t new - Douglass promoted those ideas year-round - but Blight says he knew the Fourth of July was a good hook, and expected the speech to be a hit. His friend Julia Griffith, the treasurer of the Rochester group that invited him to give the 1852 speech, was one of the people helping him fund-raise to keep the paper alive. He’d had a breakdown in the early 1850s, and was having trouble supporting his family. In the late 1840s and into the 1850s, his finances were tight, and he was struggling to sustain the newspaper he founded, The North Star. It was a turbulent time for Douglass personally, too. “It’s also an election year the 1852 presidential election was heating up that summer. The political party system was beginning to tear itself asunder over the expansion of slavery,” he says. The country was in the midst of crises over fugitive slave rescues in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. “ Uncle Tom’s Cabin had just been published that spring and was taking the country by storm. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletterĪt the time Douglass spoke, Blight says, the opportunity was ripe for a lecture on the moral crisis. “We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.” “For it is not light that is needed, but fire it is not the gentle shower, but thunder,” he said. 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.ĭouglass’ speech also foreshadowed the bloody reckoning to come: Civil War. 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 denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, 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. 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. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. ![]() What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?…
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |