Excerpt of a speech titled “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” and delivered by civil rights advocate and abolitionist Frederick Douglass on July 5, 1852, at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, N.Y., to a meeting of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society.
True Christians, Douglass said, should not stand idly by while the liberty of others is stripped away, and he denounced churches for betraying their own biblical and Christian values and converting religion into “an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty.”
IMAGE: Daguerreotype of Douglass c. 1850 by Samuel J. Miller, housed in the Art Institute of Chicago.
