An American Hero

These past weeks of anti-racist turmoil after yet another african american man was killed in police custody. The frustration, rage and fervent cries for justice boiled over. There has been much talk about lives that matter. Here is one of the people whose life mattered greatly. A man whose contribution to our shared history is particularly important these days. Frederick Douglass is known by name to many but his entire life history is less known even though it's the stuff of drama.

Hoff, "Frederick Douglass 1856," digital

Frederick Douglass was a true American hero. Born about 1818 into slavery, in Maryland, he managed to escape to Pennsylvania in 1838 after years of beatings, feeling as if he had fled a lion's den, as he said later. He did not know his likely white father and barely remembered his mixed-race mother from whom he was taken in early childhood. He was taught some rudiments of reading by a white mistress, and later taught himself to read by various means. The slave masters of the time feared literacy because, they reasoned, a slave who could read would be more likely to try to escape. Clearly, they were right.

A few years after escaping he wrote the story of his life Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which sold enormously, made him famous, and earned him enough money to buy freedom from his former owner in Maryland. He became famous in Europe and the United States well before the American Civil War. His story was so compelling that he was in wide demand as an erudite and entertaining lecturer and a fiery abolitionist. Moreover, throughout his long life he was an advocate for the rights of women and a devout believer in what he called the "Christianity of the Christ" as opposed to the Christianity of America at that time.

On July 5, 1852 Mr. Douglass delivered a short speech that deserves to be heard as much as Abraham Lincoln's address at Gettysburg ten years afterward. The talk became known as "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" Considering the ferment of the times, the talk of secession and conflict, it is an astonishing and chastening speech. In it he says, "This Fourth 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."

He also says, "The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and the crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced."

Those words again ring true.

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In the video below, James Earl Jones reads the entire speech. It is still well worth a listen.