THEDEAN’ S
JACKIE JONES
CORNER
As the United States prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4 of this year, this is a moment to review the nation’ s history – good and bad – and to once again ask the question Frederick Douglass posed in a speech in 1852 acknowledging the 76th anniversary of the document:
“ What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”
In the speech delivered at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, at the invitation of Rochester’ s Anti-Slavery society, Douglass pointed out the hypocrisy of proclaiming that all Americans are guaranteed the values of“ life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” while at the same time denying enslaved people those very rights. In fact, this nation’ s constitution has reduced their status to just three-fifths of a White person.
Douglass dismissed the notion that slaves were inferior beings by pointing out that the very laws and punishment they were subjected to was a twisted acknowledgement of the slaves full humanity.
Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia, which, if committed by a black man( no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgment that the slave is a moral, intellectual and responsible being. The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write. When you can point to any such laws, in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave.”
This issue of the Morgan Global Journalism Review is a keepsake edition, with historic civics lessons from across America’ s 250 years journey. From the Declaration of Independence to the nation’ s push-pull over the“ peculiar institution,” to the emergence of the descendants of slaves as a transcendent force in the social, political and cultural life of this nation.
I hope you’ ll share with others this black retrospective on America at 250.
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