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.