The Masses Editorial Board has chosen to republish Frederick Douglass’ “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” on the 250th anniversary of the foundation of the United States. Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818, seized his freedom by escaping slavery in 1838, and became one of the most significant abolitionist writers, orators, and organizers of the 19th century. As a formerly enslaved New Afrikan democratic revolutionary, Douglass used his life and pen to expose slavery, defend rebellion against the slave system, and indict the U.S. before the world.
Douglass spoke in Rochester, New York, in 1852 against the hypocrisy of a country that celebrated liberty while holding millions in bondage. In 2026, that contradiction has only developed: the United States stands as the head of the world capitalist system, the main imperialist power, and the enemy of the world’s peoples. The Fourth of July is presented by the ruling class as a universal celebration of democracy, freedom, and national unity. This is unequivocally false. The “freedom” of the United States was founded on Indigenous genocide, the enslavement of national minorities, the theft of land, the exploitation of labor, and the construction of the world’s hegemonic imperialist superpower.
U.S. armies occupy nations, its weapons fuel genocides, its police occupy poor and oppressed neighborhoods, and its prisons, borders, courts, landlords, and corporations enforce the dictatorship of capital. Douglass’ speech remains relevant because the national question remains central to socialist revolution in the United States. While we uphold the revolutionary and democratic content of Frederick Douglass’ struggle against slavery, we find his notion of democratic rights under capitalism to be insufficient in the modern era, as it cannot provide a Scientific Socialist understanding of oppression, exploitation, or liberation, all of which are necessary to overthrow the system of U.S. imperialism today.
Against the Old Society of slavery, imperialism, patriarchy, colonialism, exploitation, and national oppression, we uphold the necessity of a New Society: one where the working class rules, the oppressed nations are endowed with self-determination, and the capitalist dictatorship is overthrown and replaced once and for all!
“Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? 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?
I 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 life 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?
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.
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 4th 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.
What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is a 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 that would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour forth a stream, a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and the crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.”
[Oration of “What to the Slave Is the 4th of July?” by James Earl Jones as produced by Democracy Now! and Howard Zinn]
