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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. |