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, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. Frederick Douglass
About This Quote

In the book by Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, he tells a story of a slave who wanted to celebrate his freedom. He asked his master, "What is this Fourth of July to you?" His master replied with a list of reasons why it was important for this slave to be free. One reason is that he was a black man in a land of white people. He was being treated as less than human and that is why he had to have his freedom.

The master also said that the Fourth of July was the day that revealed to him more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he was the constant victim. He also said that the celebration was a sham because for him, freedom didn't mean liberty but rather license. Freedom meant that everyone would be equal and no longer owned by another person.

It wasn't about liberty but rather about equality. According to Douglass, Americans celebrated freedom with mockingly shouting, "liberty and equality" just like savages who were ignorant of what freedom really meant.

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  1. The thought of only being a creature of the present and the past was troubling. I longed for a future too, with hope in it. The desire to be free, awakened my determination to act, to think , and to speak.
  2. I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes, - a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, - a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, - and a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foulest,...
  3. The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and...
  4. If there is no struggle there is no progress.
  5. Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work.
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