“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 sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, 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 this earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”
— Douglass, Frederick, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” speech given to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, Rochester Hall, Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852. Douglass Archives of American Public Address, Northwestern University <http://douglass.speech.nwu.edu/doug_a10.htm>
Wisconsin Bail Out the People Movement 