'What To the Slave Is the Fourth of July?'

Provocative 1852 speech by abolitionist Frederick Douglass

I didn’t learn of Frederick Douglass and his thoughtful reflection on July 4th until I was a college student at UNC in the 1970s and witnessed his speech recited by Howard Lee, the first African American mayor of Chapel Hill and the first African American to be elected mayor of any majority-white city in the South.

Douglass first delivered the speech on …