READ or LISTEN: Frederick Douglass' Complete Speech: 'What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?'

America's foremost abolitionist spoke from painful experience about the evils of slavery, in front of an audience of white Americans gathered to celebrate the Fourth of July

Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of Elizabeth Cassell, 2011.43.2

On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass, a formerly enslaved man of approximately 34 years of age (slaves were not granted birth certificates so he estimated he was born in or around 1818) who had escaped from a plantation near Baltimor…