Organizing for America | Frances M. Beal's Blog: Frederick Douglass' Legacy for July 4th

Frederick Douglass' Legacy for July 4th

By Retired social justice activist and writer, with a particular focus on racial & women's rights. I'm a life-long peace advocate - Jul 5th, 2008 at 4:13 pm EDT

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Tags: 2008 Elections, freedom, patriotism, resistance

I wrote this in 2002 but it still makes good reading for Independence Day and represents the kind of patriotism we must take back for the people of this great nation.

Frederick Douglass' Legacy for Our Times
By Frances M. Beal, 9 July 2002

This year's celebration of the 4th of July marks the 150th [156th] anniversary of Frederick Douglass' presentation at the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" Douglass used the occasion to expose the full shame and treachery of slavery and in unmitigated terms castigated the nation's pieties, in particular the cherished memories of its revolution, its principles of liberty and its moral and religious ethos.

"Fellow-citizens," he proclaimed, "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 sorrow this day, 'may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue 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."

In all too many ways, the Douglass speech has as many lessons for us today
as it did for people who despised racism and tyranny in 1852. One is
reminded that the colonies suffered under the boot of the British crown,
which gave rise to resisters who "had not adopted the fashionable idea of
this day, of the infallibility of government, and the absolute character of
its acts, and who presumed to differ from the home government in respect to
the wisdom and the justice of some of those burdens and restraints. They
went so far in their excitement as to pronounce the measures of government
unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to
be quietly submitted to."

As the fireworks and firecrackers explode around us this year, let us take
to heart Frederick Douglass' reminder that "there was a time when to
pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried
men's souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of
mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right,
against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed
against the oppressor! Here lies the merit, and the one, which, of all
others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed
by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers."

And so it is today in the year 2002, when those who wrap themselves so
tightly in the U.S. flag in order to justify the erosion of the civil
rights and civil liberties are not the ones who carry the legacy of
Independence Day. In fact, Ashcroft [then U.S. Attorney General] and friends and the rest of the Bush
regime are the ideological inheritors of the Tories who opposed any
alteration in the social and economic relations of society, who relished
the privileges of the status quo, and hated all change except "silver, gold
and copper change!" as Douglass declared.

One has to ask then, where is the Frederick (or Frederica) Douglass of the
year 2002? [I would also suggest that it can be heard in the speeches by Barack Obama in 2008.]

Though the voice may be muted, it is there. It can be heard in cities from
Cambridge to Berkeley, which have passed resolutions that call the U.S.
Patriot Act a threat to the civil rights of the residents of their
communities. The unlikely town of Carrboro, North Carolina is among their
ranks as is Ann Arbor and Detroit, Michigan and Denver, Colorado. The
California City of Fremont is considering a similar resolution this week.
It can be heard among Japanese Americans who are all too cognizant of their
shameful internment in concentration camps during World War II brought on
by a distorted and racist implementation of national security concerns.
That voice is raised in organizations like the Black Radical Congress and
Black Voices for Peace and among courageous congressional representatives
like Barbara Lee, Cynthia McKinney [former U.S. rep from Georgia] and Jesse Jackson, Jr. among others.
Even some voices from the Federal bench have been raised to curb the
unrelenting and unconstitutional congressional abuses of immigrants,
Muslims, South Asians and Middle Easterners, and to stem the resurgence of
racial profiling as a legitimate police practice.

When all is said and done, however, many of our freedoms have been
seriously curtailed. In conjunction with Independence Day, the American
Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU-NC) has released a
scorecard summarizing the toll of the Bush Administration's policies on
constitutional freedoms. The tally: Bush Administration, 20; Constitution, 0. The scorecard and an accompanying chronology itemize dozens of
government actions that have limited constitutional freedoms since
September 11th. They include the expansion of wiretapping and secret search
powers under the U.S. Patriot Act; the Attorney General's directives
ordering broad questioning sweeps of young men of Middle Eastern and South
Asian origin; the erosion of attorney-client privilege, media freedom and
immigrants' rights; and the dismantling of regulations governing
intelligence-gathering procedures.

Freedom is a constant struggle, says a well-known gospel, and so it is
today. As we celebrate the courage it took to break the chains of
colonialism in the 18th Century, as well as noting the lack of grit in
allowing slavery to stain this nation's history for years to follow let us
ponder these final remarks by Frederick Douglass:

"Pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt you to celebrate and
to hold [July 4th] in perpetual remembrance. I have said that the
Declaration of Independence is the ringbolt to the chain of your nation's
destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that
instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost."

Frances M. Beal is a former political columnist for the San Francisco Bay View newspaper and retired as the Research Associate of the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU of Northern California.
Contact: fmbeal@igc.org

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