BackStory

The Meaning of July Fourth for a Negro

In 1852, Frederick Douglass was invited to give a July Fourth address at the Rochester Ladies Antislavery Association. Douglass did craft a speech, but insisted on delivering it on the fifth of July, an unofficial day of protest among black Americans.  The words Douglass spoke on that day, read here by actor Fred Morsell, are widely regarded as the rhetorical masterpiece of American abolitionism.

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