[I]n an increasingly scorching summer of polarizing national politics, the Vermont Humanities Council believes it has hit upon a powerful platform to address current affairs:
Frederick Douglass’ 164-year-old Independence Day oration of 1852.
“I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July!” the famed speaker began a century and a half ago. “Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.”
By the end, Amy Cunningham, the council’s director of community programs, couldn’t tell what time period the civil rights leader was talking about.
“It may seem surprising,” she says, “but parts of Douglass’s 1852 speech — about our responsibilities as citizens and our obligation to recognize the inequalities that still exist — read as though they could have been written last week.”
That’s why the private nonprofit council is sponsoring a “Reading Frederick Douglass” series of programs in more than 20 communities over the next three weeks so Vermonters can read aloud historic words that continue to resonate.
“Many historians say it’s one of the most important speeches of the 19th century,” program coordinator Paul Marcus says. “Ultimately he’s saying the same thing that many people are still saying.”
Consider, for example, Douglass’ references to the Declaration of Independence.
“You declare, before the world, and are understood by the world to declare, that you ‘hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that, among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’” he said.
“You profess to believe ‘that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth, and hath commanded all men, everywhere to love one another’; yet you notoriously hate, and glory in your hatred, all men whose skins are not colored like your own.”
Of course, Douglass wasn’t referring to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s call to ban Muslims and build a Mexican wall. Instead, the African-American human rights activist who lived from 1818 to 1895 was speaking about the issue of slavery that would spark the Civil War.
“Douglass was reflecting that there was a different reality in this country for people of color,” Marcus says. “And that’s still a major issue today.”
Marcus was the former director of Boston’s Community Change Inc. when the racial equity organization decided to host a communal reading of the speech, spurring the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities to promote the idea statewide.
A Green Mountain State resident, Marcus also shared the concept with the Vermont Humanities Council, which signed up four communities in 2014, 14 in 2015 and nearly two dozen this year.
“The idea of using history to talk about contemporary topics has been a priority of ours for a long time,” Cunningham says. “I find it emotional and powerful to see people reading this speech that in many ways is so relevant.”
Just ask any journalist today: Replace the references to “slavery” with a modern problem like “mass incarceration,” for example, and one might assume the address — “the feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed” — is the stuff of contemporary culture.
“Douglass is really calling on the nation,” Marcus says, “to live up to its professed values.”
A series of public readings between June 30 and July 12 will assert that in Brattleboro, Brownington, Burlington, Enosburgh, Essex Junction, Ferrisburgh, Jeffersonville, Jericho, Landgrove, Manchester, Montpelier, Norwich, Plainfield, Randolph, St. Johnsbury, South Burlington, South Hero, Tunbridge and Wallingford. More information is available on the council’s website.
“It’s an interesting collection of groups that are hosting,” Cunningham says, “from libraries and local historical societies to social justice organizations.”
Douglass himself would appreciate the fact that a speech titled “The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro” is drawing continued interest in one of the country’s whitest states.
“A change has now come over the affairs of mankind,” he concluded his address. “No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world.”
