Slavery as the Original Sin of America

With religious arguments sanctioning slavery at their peak, Frederick Douglass delivered his “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July” on July 5, 1852. Addressed to a largely white sympathetic audience in Rochester, New York, Douglass states that the slave owes nothing and has no positive feelings towards the American Founding, “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.” The American proclamations of liberty, equality, and national greatness are only “a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.” In fact, “there is not nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States.”

Because of slavery’s denial of African-Americans the rights, liberties, and privileges of citizenship, Douglass writes that “The blessing 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.” Such a denial makes America “false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.” This is America’s “great sin and shame” and makes the virtues and excellences of its founders incomplete and the promise of the country unfulfilled. Read Full Article »