“Oppression makes a wise man mad.”
– Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852
This year, for the Fourth of July, the rhetoric of patriotism has been stolen by the cable-TV demagogues, and by the white supremacists marching to the Capitol. The office of the presidency has been usurped by a venal, garish clown who cannot distinguish between his vanity and his responsibilities, let alone his country. Although the political situation has its cartoonish aspects – on the surface at least, more farce than tragedy – it’s already devastating minority communities, where immigrants and international refugees have become collateral damage. It’s a dark historical moment.
That makes it a good time to revisit the 1852 Independence Day speech of Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave and self-taught intellectual, who had much more reason than most of us to doubt the American experiment. Nevertheless, he was somehow able to balance the crimes and outrages of so much of U.S. history with the promises of its founding principles, and there to find hope in the midst of despair.
In his lengthy (by contemporary standards) oration, Douglass did not pull his punches. Throughout the speech, he refers slyly to the irony of a fugitive slave being asked to expatiate on the virtues of the American Republic. He does not deny those virtues – indeed, he allows that his audience rightfully celebrates them – but the entire speech carries his acute sense of the contradictions between the founding American principles and the country’s historical reality.
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” he asks his audience. “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.”
His immediate subject, of course, is chattel slavery, but his judgment of his country will sound painfully familiar to many of us living 165 years later.
“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.”
Justice Denied
Some readers will inevitably protest that slavery ended with the Civil War, and our current predicament is far from that of Douglass. Yet slavery was almost immediately replaced with the neo-slavery of Jim Crow – still memorialized in monuments and institutions in Austin and elsewhere – and was followed by decades of explicitly racist segregation, enforced by widespread lynching. It took a massive and decades-long civil rights rebellion to win official desegregation and the effective right to vote – with both of those crucial steps forward increasingly undermined and under official threat. In recent times, literal slavery has arguably been replaced by mass incarceration.
Has there been progress? Undeniably. But even 165 years ago, Douglass was aware of similar contradictions. “I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us,” said Douglass. “I 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 July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”
Without Despair
Even while mourning, Douglass could conclude: “Notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery.” Yet the following summation of those “forces” is the weakest part of his speech; despite generalities about “progress” here and abroad, he couldn’t foresee clearly what it would take to put an end to slavery, and how much more spilt blood it would require.
I can’t justly compare our circumstances to those of Douglass, but like him, we don’t know what it will take to lead us out of our currently dire predicament. Our government has been seized by petty tyrants and quislings, and the country is politically polarized over matters of racial and civil justice, social welfare and equity, environmental survival, and even the meaning of community. Nevertheless, as inheritors of the legacy of Frederick Douglass, we simply don’t have the right to surrender to apathy or despair. Even as “oppression makes a wise man mad,” Douglass declared – “With brave men there is always a remedy for oppression.” Words to recall and celebrate, for the Fourth of July, 2017.
This article appears in July 7 • 2017.
