Yours, Not Mine

“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 is empty and heartless. Your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impedance; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery. Your prayers and hymns, sermons, and thanksgiving, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, more bombast, fraud, deception, 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.” – Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852