If I mentally type “July 4” into the search engine of memory in my soul, I find words from the 76th anniversary of 1776 that haunt and move me. In 1852, Frederick Douglass (for me, the only orator in American history I’d place in Lincoln’s league!) was invited to give the annual July 4 address to the to the Anti-Slavery Society in Rochester, New York. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Douglass, David Blight calls his speech “a symphony in three movements,” and “one of the greatest speeches in American history,” and “the rhetorical masterpiece of American abolitionism.”
After praising the genius of the founding fathers, Douglass spoke of July 4 as the American “Passover,” alluding to the Israelites being liberated from Egyptian bondage – with a not-so-subtle reminder that those were slaves God set free at the first Passover. Then Douglass sharpened his words, which must have made his audience squirm:
“Why am I called upon to speak here today? I am not included within the pale of your glorious anniversary. This 4th of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice. I must mourn. Above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that they hear today.”
Douglass actually loved the Declaration of Independence, and thundered that its saving principles (liberty and equality) “might yet be dusted off and made to gleam.” Yet, the sorry past and the pathetic present can become hopeful “only as we make it useful to the future. Now is the time.”
One person impacted by Douglass was a wealthy white man, Gerrit Smith, who gave away today’s equivalent of $1 billion to causes like Douglass’s The North Star, the Underground Railroad, refuge housing for runaway slaves, and actual farm property in the Adirondacks to any escaped slave ready to be independent. Freedom, for Smith, wasn’t something to sigh and smile about. Freedom was a trust, a responsibility to ensure that we have “liberty and justice for all.”
Even Douglass got gently dissed by another great orator of the day – and a black slave woman at that! Sojourner Truth famously preached a sermon in 1858 in which she bared her arm (and also tore open the front of her dress – which is the way slave women were treated when exhibited on the auction block!) and asked “Ain’t I a woman? Look at me.” She proceeded to tell how she had plowed and planted, wet-nursed white children, and born the lash – and yet wasn’t she plainly a child of God? To a minister who interrupted her, she pointedly inquired, “Where did you get your Christ from?” {My daughter Sarah, btw, composed and performed a song based on this sermon! Watch/listen here.}
Sitting on the front row during one of Douglass’s fiery orations, Sojourner Truth heard him cynically declaring that he had no faith that blacks would ever be treated decently by whites: “They must redeem themselves, or it will never be done.” Truth, in her deep, resonant voice, upbraided him: “Be careful, Frederick; is God dead?” Douglass later recalled that “we were all brought to a standstill, just as we should have been if someone had thrown a brick through the window.”
This pair of ex-slaves become brilliant speech-makers remind me, here on the 250th anniversary of July 4, to ask What is possible with God? We’ve become such cynics, grousing about the other half of America while semi-embarrassed about our own half, sure that the standoff is forever. But is God dead?
Douglass and Truth also press us to ask Who’s left out when we proudly celebrate our freedom? As Christians, we can’t default to the politically naïve notion that anybody can be anything they wish to be in America. As Christians, we listen for and seek out the marginalized, the oppressed, those with vastly less equal opportunity. Martin Luther King memorably pointed out that those who tell a child to pull himself up by his bootstraps haven’t noticed the child doesn’t have any shoes.
We ask if we might grow up to be like Gerrit Smith. Or even dare to dream that our country might live into what many of the first settlers and then the founders dreamed of – that America would be a light to the nations, hope for the rest of the world, spreading, sharing, aiding and empowering others. How biblical!