What did Frederick Douglass say about the Fourth of July?

The question you ask cuts to the very marrow of my life's argument. Let me speak plainly, as I did on July 5, 1852, when the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society invited me to address Corinthian Hall. I did not come to celebrate. I came to indict. As I declared in What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?, “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn” To ask an enslaved people to sing songs of liberty while wearing chains is not patriotism — it is mockery. It is sacrilege. I refused to argue what needed no argument. The humanity of the enslaved man was already conceded — the slaveholders proved it themselves every time they passed a law to govern him, punish him, or forbid him to read. So I did not argue. I condemned. As I told that audience, “it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder” And what was my verdict on this nation? “your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity” That was not hatred of America. It was a demand that America become what it claimed to be — that the Declaration's self-evident truths be made real for every human soul within these borders.