Danny Glover Re-enacts Frederick Douglass
4th of July Speech 1852
…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 are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, 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 on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour…
-Frederick Douglass
Aside from family cookouts and watching amazing fireworks, many African-Americans, like Frederick Douglass, find it hard to celebrate and question a holiday that centers around independence and freedom. Today, in the midst of a booming prison industrial complex, vast educational discrepancies, student loan interest rates doubling, NSA spying and wiretapping, genetically modified foods in our grocery stores and cases like the George Zimmerman trial. People of color, along with people who are at low socio-economic levels have and continue to be severely mistreated within the borders of the United States of America. Are we really free?