What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?

Frederick Douglass was born enslaved, in Maryland. He was taken from his mother in infancy and lived with his maternal grandmother, who was also enslaved. At the age of six he was taken from his grandmother and sent to a plantation in Talbot County, Maryland. At the age of eight he was “given” to a woman who sent him to be a servant to a family in Baltimore. In 1838, when he was twenty, he escaped to Delaware and eventually made his way to New York and then to Massachusetts. As a free man, Douglass became one of America’s greatest voices for the ideals which gave birth to the country, in part by repeatedly pointing out that those ideals were not being extended to him. His speech in Rochester, New York, on July 4, 1852, is a timeless reminder of the failings, and the promises, of America. - Summary by Tom Shoesmith