In his speech, Douglass delivered a scathing attack on the hypocrisy of a nation celebrating freedom and independence with speeches, parades and platitudes, while, within its borders, nearly four million humans were being kept as slaves.

   Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) was the best known and most influential African American leader of the 1800s. He was born a slave in Maryland but managed to escape to the North in 1838.

He traveled to Massachusetts and settled in New Bedford, working as a laborer to support himself. In 1841, he attended a convention of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society and quickly came to the attention of its members, eventually becoming a leading figure in the New England antislavery movement.

In 1845, Douglass published his autobiography, “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: an American Slave.” With the revelation that he was an escaped slave, Douglass became fearful of possible re-enslavement and fled to Great Britain and stayed there for two years, giving lectures in support of the antislavery movement in America. With the assistance of English Quakers, Douglass raised enough money to buy his own his freedom and in 1847 he returned to America as a free man.

He settled in Rochester, New York, where he published The North Star, an abolitionist newspaper. He directed the local underground railroad which smuggled escaped slaves into Canada and also worked to end racial segregation in Rochester’s public schools.

During the 1850s, Frederick Douglass typically spent about six months of the year travelling extensively, giving lectures. During one winter — the winter of 1855-1856 — he gave about 70 lectures during a tour that covered four to five thousand miles. And his speaking engagements did not halt at the end of a tour. From his home in Rochester, New York, he took part in local abolition-related events.

In 1852, the leading citizens of Rochester asked Douglass to give a speech as part of their Fourth of July celebrations. Douglass accepted their invitation. On July 5, 1852, Douglass gave a speech at an event commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence, held at Rochester’s Corinthian Hall. It was biting oratory, in which the speaker told his audience, “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.” And he asked them, “Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?”

Douglass proceeded to deliver a scathing attack on the hypocrisy of a nation celebrating freedom and independence with speeches, parades and platitudes, while, within its borders, nearly four million humans were being kept as slaves.

Within the now-famous address is what historian Philip S. Foner has called “probably the most moving passage in all of Douglass’ speeches.”

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

The Speech follows:

REFERENCES:

1. Document - United States Declaration of Independence

   [Enlarge Image]

2. United States Declaration of Independence — Wikipedia

3. From AfriqueOnline: America is a country born of hypocrisy and nurtured in racism and oppression. How stupendous a hypocrite do you have to be to write a document that declares “All men are created equal” while at that very moment you have two hundred human beings chained in your back yard working as your slaves? America’s political system (which was designed by these hypocrites) is no better that a shell game which gives rich people control and the rest of us the shaft…..[MORE >>]

Popularity: 17% [?]

By: Paul Harris in Williamson, West Virginia

“Bigot” Democrats in rural strongholds refuse to give backing to Obama

The conservative Appalachian heartlands voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton - and will switch to McCain in November

Johnny Telvor was not happy about Barack Obama becoming the Democratic presidential nominee. Not happy at all.

Standing outside the sturdy courthouse in the sweltering heat of a West Virginia afternoon in the small town of Williamson, Telvor smoked a cigarette and bluntly gave his opinion of Obama’s historic mission to be America’s first black president.

‘We’ll end up slaves. We’ll be made slaves just like they was once slaves,’ he said. Telvor, a white Democrat who supported Hillary Clinton in West Virginia’s primary, said he planned to vote for Republican John McCain in November. ‘At least he’s an American,’ he added with a disarmingly friendly smile.

Such racist opinions are a rough antidote to the giddy optimism that has swept through much of America’s chattering classes over the past week. Since Obama beat Clinton and finally became the Democratic nominee liberal pundits from New York to San Francisco have eagerly discussed how Obama’s unique candidacy will put America’s racially charged past behind it. The United States, they have argued, is finally prepared to elect a black president and absolve its historic sins of slavery and Jim Crow. But the uglier truth is that part of white America remains secretly - or sometimes openly - deeply distrustful of the idea of a black president.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the vastness of the Appalachian mountains that run from Maine through West Virginia and all the way down to Georgia. Here Obama faces his greatest problem in convincing poor white citizens to vote for him. They certainly have not backed him so far. In West Virginia Clinton trounced Obama by more than 30 points. It is a place of deep poverty and astonishing natural beauty - and it is overwhelmingly white. Outsiders deride it as ‘hillbilly’ country. But it is also somewhere that has a special place in America’s heart. Appalachia is where the TV series The Waltons was set. It is a place of deep family values, where clannish folk have created a vibrant mountain culture of God and guns. It is also a place not used to voting for a black politician. ‘McCain will win here,’ said Telvor. ‘No doubt about it.’

Williamson is a typical slice of Appalachia. The town of 3,000 souls lies on the banks of the Tug Fork River, overshadowed by the mountains that surround it. A railway runs through the centre of town, which has long been used to hard times as the coal industry faded away.

The town is in the heart of Mingo County in West Virginia. In last month’s Democratic primary, a staggering 88 per cent of people in Mingo County voted for Clinton - the highest number in the whole state - compared with just 8 per cent willing to put a cross by Obama’s name. Those are landslide numbers that even some third world dictators would be embarrassed to record. And, as went Mingo, so went the entire state. ‘This state is white, elderly and working class. This is not natural Obama country. People are not used to having black politicians on the ballot,’ said Professor Allan Hammock, a political scientist at West Virginia University.

The sheer scale of Clinton’s win in West Virginia - repeated from Pennsylvania to Georgia - took many pundits by surprise. But it did not shock people in Williamson, Jack Spence among them. The elderly retiree, enjoying the hot weather on a street bench, said he voted for Clinton and, now she has lost, he plans to sit out the November election. ‘I can’t vote for a Republican. My daddy would just roll over in his grave,’ he said. But nor can he bring himself to vote for Obama, though he insisted it was not because of race. ‘That does not matter to me. Though it might to a lot of folks around here,’ he said.

Was there anything Obama could say during the coming campaign to convince him? ‘Nope,’ Spence replied. Then he broached the one issue many Americans consider off-limits: the potential security threat to Obama. ‘Look, someone will kill him. Whoever Obama picks as running mate will end up being president.’ Spence’s ready smile and chatty manner on the thorny issue of Obama’s possible murder gave little clue as to whether he thought it would be a bad thing or not.

   An Appalachian HillBilly — Clinging To God, Guns, and “MoonShine Liquor!”

Often such sentiments are dismissed as the ramblings of a few diehards, carrying with them the prejudices of a by-gone age. After all, Iowa, a very white state, was the place Obama first won. But the fact is Obama’s Appalachian problem is very real.

Williamson and West Virginia are far from alone in rejecting Obama. Take Pikeville, Kentucky. It welcomes visitors with a cheerful sign that boasts it is one of ‘the 100 best small towns in America’. But it is not friendly country for Obama. On Pikeville’s main street, just outside a now abandoned Obama campaign office, Stanley Little laughed when asked if he could support Obama. ‘I will vote for McCain,’ he said. Little, a maintenance man for local offices, had one simple reason why he too was rejecting his long family history of voting Democrat. ‘McCain is one of us. Obama ain’t,’ he said, leaving little doubt as to who he meant by ‘us’.

Pikeville’s rejection of Obama in Kentucky topped even Mingo County’s. Pike County, a huge stretch of forest and hills in the east of Kentucky, voted for Clinton by a thumping 91 per cent versus a mere 7 per cent for Obama. Only nearby Magoffin County (where Clinton scored 93 per cent) is even less friendly to an Obama candidacy.

It is not just an Appalachian issue. There are pockets of this sentiment across America from the working class white suburbs of Philadelphia to the rust belt towns of Ohio and Michigan. Many poor, white Americans are prepared to flock to McCain rather than face a black occupant of the White House. No public courtship between Obama and Clinton - carried out on the nation’s TV screens - is likely to change that. In Georgia a local bar owner has been selling T-shirts featuring Obama being endorsed by a cartoon monkey eating a banana. The sale prompted outraged coverage in the local media but the T-shirts quickly sold out. In Vincennes, Indiana, an Obama campaign office was vandalised on the eve of the state’s primary, its windows smashed and its walls spray-painted with the words ‘Hamas votes BHO’ (for Barack Hussein Obama).

The difficult truth is that Appalachia is unusual mostly because many people here are willing to openly talk about what some of their fellow citizens are secretly thinking. In exit polls of the recent primaries in Kentucky and West Virginia, one in five Democrats confessed to pollsters that race was a factor in their voting choice. ‘West Virginia and Kentucky were just more honest than other parts of the country. A lot of other people know it’s not socially acceptable to mention that sort of thing,’ said Professor Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University and expert on racial politics.

Indeed much of America’s media has been resolutely focused on a ‘post-racial’ vision of America despite the clear evidence that race remains a huge divide in American life. Obama’s own bi-racial background and his campaign’s language of inclusivity have conjured up a beguiling image of a race-free America. It has built on other recent black political successes in America, such as Newark mayor Cory Booker and Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, who have won on the back of black-white voting alliances. There is truth to it too. Obama has run a remarkable campaign, winning many white states such as Kansas and Montana. He has attracted vast, racially diverse rallies, especially of young people who seem open to putting racial divides behind them. And indeed there is much hope that Obama can change things. Gillespie points out that recent studies have shown that white voters in US cities that have elected a black mayor for the first time prove far more willing to elect one for a second term. ‘They realise the sky has not fallen in. That life went on,’ Gillespie joked. If Obama does win the White House, that experience could be repeated on a national scale for all Americans. Few things could be more important in finally drawing the poison of racism out of American life.

But behind such optimism, another America looms. It is an America far from the headlines that have proclaimed Obama’s candidacy a revolution that will atone for a race-tinged history. This is the America where outrageous rumours that Obama is a Muslim are readily believed. It is the America where Telvor is able to voice a sentiment that ‘Obama might actually be the antichrist‘ without apparent irony or fear of contradiction. It is a slice of America trapped in the dreadful history of race relations and the legacy of slavery and segregation.

On the streets of towns such as Pikeville and Williamson, and in the minds of people like Little and Telvor, that past lives on. It is kept in the present by poverty, joblessness and a fear of the different. It is also a powerful force that should not be underestimated. It could even decide who will be the next President. ‘McCain will beat Obama. There’s a lot of Democrats around here that will be switching side to vote for him,’ Little said. Behind him a white-washed message in the closed Obama Pikeville office read: ‘Vote Obama 08: change!’ In the brutal summer heat it seemed a forlorn hope. It was asking for the overthrow of generations of entrenched prejudice. But, come November, a black president might finally be pulling up a chair behind the desk in the Oval Office. If he does, that slogan of change might just end up being a prophecy. Even in Appalachia.

Popularity: 30% [?]

   Prof. Ali Mazrui
Last week in this space I posed a challenge to the United States of America: Will it realise its potential of becoming humankind’s post-racial garden of Eden, completing the odyssey from Africa as the first Garden of Eden? Or will the country waste that opportunity through bigotry, prejudice, and conflict?

This week we raise the question: What are the migrations that initiated the linkage between the first Garden of Eden and the second Garden of Eden? The garden of birth was Africa; the garden of potential post-raciality is the United States. Will the human race need the Edenisation of America towards the post-racial age?

The story of Adam and Eve occurs in three of the great world religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Only two of the three Abrahamic religions have featured prominently in the belief systems of the African peoples – Christianity and Islam. Christianity and Islam have cast a shadow on the migrations of African peoples from the continent of the First Eden to the shores of the Second.

Central to the transfer of the African peoples from Africa to America was of course the role of Europe. If Africa invented the human race, Europe perfected racism. Europeans then inaugurated the most extensive trade in slaves ever attempted in human history. Both European racism and European slave trade helped to set the stage for creating a multi-racial ‘New World.’ The final Eden was slowly in the making.

It is common knowledge that one of the ways by which Europeans legitimised the slave trade was by portraying Africans as heathens and cannibals. What is not often realised is that African resistance to European enslavement was in turn partly inspired by African fears that those white-skinned people were the ones who were cannibals.

As a Dutch contemporary Willem Bosman summed it up, “Sometimes we deal with slaves from deep in the interior, who convince each other that the reason why we buy and transport them is to fatten them and sell them again for an appetising meal.”

What was happening was the forceful transfer of citizens of the world’s first Garden of Eden (Africa) to the shores of what may well turn out to be the world’s final Garden of Eden- the USA. That part of the population of the United States that was of African descent was historically destined to play decisive roles in the evolution of the second Eden towards its historic destiny.

The anti-slavery spirit of resistance among Africans was inspired by many factors, including love for freedom and a determination to remain on the soil of their ancestors. But a perception of the white man as a cannibal, as the ultimate serpent who might eat up the African, aggravated African anxieties.

In 1752 one European captain in the harbour of Paramaribo, Suriname, was worried about whether his enslaved Africans on his ship Prins Willem V would jump overboard because “they feared they would be eaten” on arrival at their destination.

And an 18th century European handbook for slave traders urged the slavers to “assure the slaves, after they have been purchased, that they should not be afraid- that white people were not cannibals…” In our terms, the serpent was historically deadly, but was not a man-eater in the literal sense.

Back in Africa, indigenous rulers differed in their attitude to the slave trade. John Thornton reminds us that Queen Nzinga Nbande of Matamba in Angola tried to mobilise and coordinate opposition to the Portuguese slave traders in the 1630s and 1640s. But the Portuguese fought back and unfortunately got African allies in opposition to Queen Nzinga.

In the 18th century, Tomba, the leader of the Baga on the Guinean Coast, also tried to stop the slave trade but was opposed by resident Europeans, Mulattoes and African collaborators.

Agaji Trudo was one of the greatest kings of Dahomey. He was hostile to the slave trade, and invaded coastal Aja kingdoms partly in a bid to stop the trade. His successes were short lived. Racist Europe persevered.

Our essay here poses the issue of whether there is a secular historical and collective version of the biblical story of Genesis. Should we look at Africa as the first Garden of Eden – the original habitat of the human species, fallible, mortal and therefore profoundly human? Should we look at the United States as potentially the second Eden, the future vanguard of a post-racial world?

In 1978 William Julius Wilson alerted us about The Declining Relevance of Race. Prof Wilson might have been prophetic rather than descriptive.

America as the second Garden of Eden must first get its racial house in order. Between now and the end of the 21st century, America has to learn how to cope with race and ethnicity, with an increasingly aging population, and with the gender gaps of privilege in its population.

America must learn how to accommodate its impatient youth, how to re-define its moral values, and how to become the final burying ground of sectarian hatreds and racial strife on the world scene.

Here is the Tale of Two Edens – Africa where the human species began, and America where the human species stands a chance of attaining its optimum post-racial fulfillment, guided by African Americans as sons and daughters of the first Eden.

That Africa was the first Garden of Eden is a fact of history and paleontology. There was light in the Dark Continent before there was light anywhere else. That America is the second Garden of Eden is still a matter of hope and aspiration. Let there be divine light on America too.

Thus is it written: There was made the first man, the African living soul.

Then, the last ideal, the American life-giving post-racial spirit.

Millennia after Adam there arose an Obama. It is now conceivable, nay credible, that our great grandchildren, of all ethnicities and all faiths, of all colours and all national origins, may witness such a miracle of a post-racial dawn before the end of this century.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Obama Faces Racism in West Virginia - video powered by Metacafe

….Red State Update

Popularity: 37% [?]

 Columnist - John Sammon
The controversy over Reverend Wright and his torpedoing of the campaign of his parishioner Barack Obama proves how childish and paranoid the American people have become.

If this happened in Europe, Europeans being more sophisticated and somewhat more intelligent on average than Americans, there would be no controversy. Europeans wouldn’t hold Obama accountable for the statements of his pastor.

We’re operating under the allusion that if Wright says it, Obama believes it too. Guilt by association. It’s amusing to hear McCain call Wright’s remarks extremist, a few months after he sang a Beach Boys song, “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran (sung to the tune of Barbara Ann).

Nobody called McCain’s sick joke extremist.

What has Wright said? Wright has the right to say it. He said instead of God bless America, God should damn America. In fairness. If the truth be known. Some of America should be damned. Such as the below.

1. America annihilated its Indian population and stole their land.

2. Americans kept others in slavery and then after a war to end it, kept African Americans in virtual servitude for the next hundred years with racist segregation.

3. Other crimes including Agent Orange for which there is not space here.

Wright called America an “imperialist” power. Well. We are. At times. We have a tendency to invade poor little countries much smaller than ours in an attempt to make them see it our way. We’ve invaded Nicaragua a half dozen times. Maybe instead of calling it “imperialist,” we should call it “concern” for Nicaraguan affairs.

President Bush wants the right to torture prisoners, and that’s not called “extremist.”

Wright’s statement that AIDS is a government plot to get rid of black Americans is a little bit far fetched and I can’t go along with that one.

That Obama’s campaign will go down the tubes because of statements made by someone over whom he (Obama) has no control is an abject lesson that to play the political game, you have to be foolishly optimistic and upbeat and never tell Americans very much of the unpleasant truths about their country. Thus, we can always feel superior, that we’re better people.

God only blesses America. God must be American and Republican.

Clearly, there is a price to be paid when you’re too candid.

It’s also another example of how the American people want to fixate on personality rather than issues. It has a long history from the Willie Horton episode that sank Michael Dukakis’s presidential hopes, to Thomas Eagleton, the vice presidential candidate who had prior mental problems, was replaced, but helped to terminate George McGovern’s campaign, or the Swift Boat right wing smear campaign against John Kerry.

You simply can’t be too truthful with the American people, if the truth is unpleasant. This is not new either. They forced Socrates to take poison.

I don’t believe America has sole ownership of morality, that we’re above reproach, that we’re God’s chosen people (especially white Republicans). Does that make me unpatriotic?

Wright is voicing frustration with a system that he thinks (with good reason) has treated he and his flock unfairly. He doesn’t speak for Obama just because Obama attends his church any more than commentator Bill O’Reilly speaks for McCain because McCain appears on his TV show.

The lesson here is clear. If you want to win office, don’t associate with big-mouth preachers, and don’t be too honest with the American people.

Copyright 2008 Sammonsays.

Popularity: 32% [?]