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Hello All:
Happy Fourth of July to you - or Happy Day of Liberation - or what ever!
Frederick Douglass is indeed one of my personal heroes.
The high school I attended was named after him while he was still living - in Oklahoma City, OK in 1881. The original school was built by Blacks in an all Black community in OKC for All Black students (actually Black and Indian).
I read his book my Bondage and my Freedom twice - once in High School; the second time about 6 years ago - It's amazing what stands out as an adult that you don't quite understand when you're a kid.
Which brings me to the speech about the celebration of the Declaration of Independence - and the speech he made in 1852 - 10 years before the Emancipation Proclamation - 13 years before the end of the Civil War.
I think if one would really do their homework, they would find that quite a bit had changed from the time he wrote and delivered that speech, to the time of his transition to the realm of Ancestor/Angel. I think folks might find that he actually did begin to participate in 4th of July ceremonies - locally and in his travels throughout the various Black communities in and around the US. The speech was certainly true in 1852 - and when you really think about it, there are elements of it that have some validity today. But that was delivered by the Abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The liberated and celebrated Frederick Douglass began to resonate more to celebrating the 4th as he began to see Black people being possibly integrated into America via the 13th Amendment and other civil rights acts.
Mind you, I have no problem with folks quoting his speech (see below) - just want them to contexturize it so that folks get an understanding of the tenor of the times - and the aftermath - and the change that took place in his viewpoint between 1852 and 1895. I'm a history buff - and it irks me something awful to have folks think that those were his final words or thoughts on the celebration of the Declaration of Independence - when they weren't.
The other thing about Frederick Douglass that some may try to gloss over, is that his second wife was not Black, but caucasian (or so I've been told) and I always wanted to know what his rationale behind that choice was. We have a few contemporary heroes with that same issue - Harry Belafonte springs to mind. He is also a personal hero - who has been married to white women - twice. Julian Bond - is another. So I do have some cognitive dissonance when I look at all these wonderful, fine Black men - and their contributions and their leadership in the Black community; and what they do is in glaring contrast to what they say.
In reference to the rationale of whether or not to celebrate the Fourth of July- don't think there is a society on the planet that doesn't have its own set of myths, legends, lies, cover ups and propaganda that they tell their people - for benign and not so benign reasons. We are as prone to them as the caucasians. Ours are a helluva lot less harmful - and America has more propaganda than a little bit. And the possibility or probability of their changing or ameliorating it is somewhere between slim and none.
To me, if you wanted more up-to-date salient reasons for not celebrating the Fourth of July, it would be better to base them on the information referenced by Michael Coard in an article I thought I'd share with you from the PHILADELPHIA TRIBUNE:
"SHOULD BLACKS CELEBRATE THE 4TH OF JULY" ( Another personal Hero of mine, Michael Coard, president of ATAC - (Avenging the Ancestors Coalition)
click on the link for the full article:
That said, I, for one, enjoy the 4th of July - despite the fact that we were certainly not materially included in it from the outset. I still enjoy the sparklers, roman candles, and going out at night to watch the fireworks. They're fun, but we're not fooled. We know we still have a lot of work to do to make sure this country redeems itself in terms of what it owes us as a people. But I'm not caught up in the mythology or hype that is America - just like we know that the streets are not paved with gold, or that America acknowledges that the Statue of Liberty, designed by the French was modeled after a Black woman. It's as much a part of the American Mythology as the myths of ancient Greece, Rome or other nations.
This is the speech Douglass delivered in New York City - it was shared by brother Ernst Perodin:
Remember - that was delivered in 1852!
Subject: "What To The American Slave Is Your 4th Of July?" By Frederick Douglass------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------ ------------------------ FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Excerpt from Independence Day Speech at Rochester, New York, July 5, 1852
***************************************************
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.***************************************************
A F r e d e r i c k D o u g l a s s C h r o n o l o g yThe Life of Frederick Douglass
1818-1895
1818 -- (Exact date unknown) Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey is born on Holme Hill farm in Talbot County on the Eastern Shore of Maryland to Harriet Bailey, a slave. Frederick never knew his father but suspected him to be his owner, Captain Aaron Anthony.
1826 -- Sent to live with Hugh Auld family in Baltimore.
1827 -- Asks Sophia Auld to teach him his letters. Hugh Auld stops the lessons because he feels that learning makes slaves discontented and rebellious.
1834 -- Hired Out to Edward Covey, a "slave breaker", to break his spirit and make him accept slavery.
1836 -- Tries to escape from slavery, but his plot is discovered.
1836-38 -- Works in Baltimore shipyards as a caulker. Falls in love with Anna Murray, a free Negro (daughter of slaves).
1838 -- Escapes from slavery, goes to New York City, marries Anna Murray and settles in New Bedford, Massachusetts; selects a new name: Frederick Douglass.
1839 -- Subscribes to William Garrison's The Liberator.
1841 -- First speaks at an antislavery meeting in Nantucket; William Lloyd Garrison hires him as a lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society; spends the next four years on the lecture circuit speaking out against slavery and campaigning for rights of free Blacks. 1842 -- Makes first visit to Rochester attending a convention of Blacks.
1845 -- Publishes the first of three autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave; to escape recapture following publication, tours Great Britain as an antislavery speaker, visiting England, Scotland, and Ireland; British friends and supporters purchase his freedom a year later for £150 from Hugh Auld, his former master.
1847 -- Returns to the United States as a free rnan. Against the advice of Garrison, moves to Rochester, New York, to publish a weekly newspaper, the North Star, which in later years becomes Frederick Douglass' Paper and finally Douglass' Monthly.
1848 -- Attends the first Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York and advocates the right to vote for women.
1850 -- Publishes an attack on the Compromise of 1850 and the new fugitive-slave law.
1851 -- Changes the name of North Star to Frederick Douglass's Paper. Helps three fugitive Maryland slaves escape to Canada as "Station Master" of the Rochester terminus of the Underground Railroad.
1852 -- Splits with Garrison over the means to achieve the abolition of slavery. Chosen vice-presidential candidate at the Liberal Party convention.
1855 -- Publishes his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom.
1858 -- John Brown stays at the Douglass home in Rochester while developing plans for encouraging a slave revolt.
1859 -- After assisting John Brown in drawing up plans to incite a slave revolt, Douglass declines to join the raid on Harper's Ferry; escapes to Canada to avoid being arrested and then sails to England to avoid prosecution, staying six months.
1860 -- Returns to the United States upon hearing of the death of his eleven-year old daughter, Annie and is not charged in the John Brown raid.
1861 -- The Civil War begins. Calls for the use of Black troops to fight the Confederacy through the establishment of Negro regiments in the Union Army. November: Abraham Lincoln is elected president. December: South Carolina secedes from the Union.
1862 -- Congress abolishes slavery in Washington, D.C.
1863 -- Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation takes effect, abolishing slavery in the states that are "in rebellion." Douglass becomes a recruiter for the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the first regiment of African-American soldiers; his sons Lewis and Charles join the regiment. Eventually his son Frederick Douglass Jr. becomes an army recruiter also. Meets with President Lincoln to discuss the unequal pay and poor treatment black soldiers receive. About 180,000 African Americans serve in the Civil War on the Union side.
1864 -- Meets with Lincoln again. In case the war is not a total Union victory, Lincoln asks Douglass to prepare an effort to assist slaves escaping to the North.
1865 -- April 14, Lincoln is assassinated. The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing slavery, is ratified.
1866 -- Attends convention of Equal Rights Association and clashes with women's rights leaders over their insistence that the vote not be extended to Black men unless it is given to all women at the same time.
1867 -- Turns down President Andrew Johnson's offer to name him commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau inasmuch as the National Black Leadership supported General Oliver O. Howard's continuation in the post.
1870 -- Becomes owner and editor of the New National Era, a weekly newspaper in Washington, D.C.
1871 -- President Ulysses S. Grant appoints Douglass to the Commission of Inquiry into the possible annexation of Santo Domingo.
1872 -- Rochester home mysteriously destroyed by fire (arson?) with the loss of the newspaper archives. Moves his family to Washington, DC. Nominated for vice-president by Equal Rights Party on a ticket headed by Victoria Woodhull.
1874 -- Named president of the troubled Freedmen's Savings and Trust Company. Works with the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee to save the bank, which ultimately fails. 1875 -- Congress passes a Civil Rights Act prohibiting discrimination in public places.
1877 -- Appointed U.S. Marshal for the District of Columbia by President Rutherford B. Hayes.
1878 -- Purchases Cedar Hill, a 9-acre estate in the Anacostia section of Washington, DC. 1881 -- President James A. Garfield appoints Douglass recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia; publishes his third autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.
1882 -- Anna Murray Douglass dies. Abolitionist 1813-1882
NOTE: Because of her husband, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey's prominent place in American Black History, it is easy to see how Anna Murray could easily be over shadowed. However, because of her tremendous courage, loyalty, love, and support for Bailey, she too has secured a place in history. It was through Murray's financial efforts that Bailey was able to escape from Baltimore to New York disguised as a sailor. Upon his safe arrival, she joined him, and the two were married. They assumed the name 'Johnson', but after meeting Nathan Johnson of New Bedford, Mass., he formally introduced the new couple as Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Douglass. While Frederick traveled, Anna provided comfort and shelter to hundreds of runaway slaves at their Rochester, New York home, which served as a station on the Underground Railroad. Although illiterate, she was the family's financial manager and maintained rock solid stability during Frederick's absence. Stricken with paralysis, Anna Murray Douglass, a devoted wife and mother of our, died in their Washington D.C. home in 1882.
1884 -- Having been a widower since 1882, Douglass marries Helen Pitts, his former secretary.
1889-91 -- Serves as minister and consul to Haiti, appointed by President Benjamin Harrison.
1891 -- Revises and then republishes Life and Times autobiography.
1892-93 -- Appointed Charge d'Affaires for Santo Domingo and Minister Resident and Consul-General to Haiti. Leads Haitian legation to World's Columbian Exposition.
1895 -- Dies at his home (Cedar Hill) of a heart attack.
12 Ethical Principles
* Understanding that the proper use of power is to help others.
* Giving up something you want in order to help someone else.
* Learning how to challenge and overcome doubt.
* Understanding why and how to control the human ego.
* Doing what is right and proper without delay, even if no one is looking.
* Learning how to use knowledge and understanding wisely.
* Overcoming indecisiveness by developing proper organizational skills.
* Making gratitude a part of every thought and action.
* Practicing the skill of listening before making judgments.
* Remaining true to your word.
* Practicing the art of giving without expecting something in return.
* Recognizing that success is as much a motivation to others as to you.
But I don't want us to overlook the symbology of the Declaration of Independence and what it is saying from a spiritual, motivational standpoint, either - and I think Joel and Victoria Osteen put it very succinctly; so that we don't get so mired down in the issues of race, that we overlook the deeper message we can glean from this and apply it to our lives - individually and collectively.
I'm sharing it here:
|
NOW THAT YOU KNOW
WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?
Stay Blessed &
ECLECTICALLY BLACK
&
FREE!!!!
Gloria
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