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Fellow citizens, pardon me,
allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak
here today? 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?
Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that
an affirmative answer could be truthfully
returned to these questions! Then would my task
be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For
who is there so cold that a nation's sympathy
could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to
the claims of gratitude that would not
thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits?
Who so stolid and selfish that would not give
his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation's
jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been
torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a
case like that the dumb might eloquently speak
and the "lame man leap as an hart."
But such is not the state of the case. I say it
with a sad sense of the disparity between us. am
not included within the pale of this glorious
anniversary! Your high independence only reveals
the immeasurable distance between us. The
blessings in which you, this day, rejoice are
not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of
justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence
bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not
by me. The sunlight that brought light and
healing to you has brought stripes and death to
me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You
may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in
fetters into the grand illuminated temple of
liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous
anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious
irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me by
asking me to speak today? If so, there is a
parallel to your conduct. And let me warn that
it is dangerous to copy the example of nation
whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown
down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that
nation in irrevocable ruin! I can today take up
the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten
people.
"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down.
Yea! We wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged
our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there, they that carried us away captive,
required of us a song; and they who wasted us
required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the
songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord's song
in a strange land? If I forget thee, O
Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to
the roof of my mouth."
Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous
joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose
chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are,
today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee
shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do
not faithfully remember those bleeding children
of sorry this day, "may my right hand cleave to
the roof of my mouth"! To forget them, to pass
lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with
the popular theme would be treason most
scandalous and shocking, and would make me a
reproach before God and the world. My subject,
then, fellow citizens, is American slavery. I
shall see this day and its popular
characteristics from the slave's point of view.
Standing there identified with the American
bondman, making his wrongs mine. I do not
hesitate to declare with all my soul that the
character and conduct of this nation never
looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of
July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the
past or to the professions of the present, the
conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and
revolting. America is false to the past, false
to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be
false to the future. Standing with God and the
crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I
will, in the name of humanity which is outraged,
in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the
name of the Constitution and the Bible which are
disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in
question and to denounce, with all the emphasis
I can command, everything that serves to
perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of
America! "I will not equivocate, I will not
excuse"; I will use the severest language I can
command; and yet not one word shall escape me
that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by
prejudice, shall not confess to be right and
just....
For the present, it is enough to affirm the
equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not as
astonishing that, while we are plowing,
planting, and reaping, using all kinds of
mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing
bridges, building ships, working in metals of
brass, iron, copper, and secretaries, having
among us lawyers doctors, ministers, poets,
authors, editors, orators, and teachers; and
that, while we are engaged in all manner of
enterprises common to other men, digging gold in
California, capturing the whale in the Pacific,
feeding sheep and cattle on the hillside,
living, moving, acting, thinking, planning,
living in families as husbands, wives, and
children, and above all, confessing and
worshiping the Christian's God, and looking
hopefully for life and immortality beyond the
grave, we are called upon to prove that we are
men!...
What, am I to argue that it is
wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their
liberty, to work them without wages, to keep
them ignorant of their relations to their fellow
men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their
flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with
irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at
auction, to sunder their families, to knock out
their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them
into obedience and submission to their masters?
Must I argue that a system thus marked with
blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No!
I will not. I have better employment for my time
and strength than such arguments would imply....
What, to the American slave, is your Fourth 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
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. There is not
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.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam
through all the monarchies and despotisms- of
the Old World, travel through South America,
search out every abuse, and when you have found
the last, lay your facts by the side of the
everyday practices of this nation, and you will
say with me that, for revolting barbarity and
shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a
rival.
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