Frederick Douglass and the Slave's Point of View

On October 26, 2020, Danielle Allen and Peter Myers hosted a virtual conversation at Arizona State University about Frederick Douglass and his most famous speech “What to the slave is the 4th of July?”

On July 5, 1852, more than a decade before the abolition of slavery, Frederick Douglass spoke to the Ladies Anti-Slavery Society of Rochester, N.Y., to explain the slave’s point of view with regard to the 4th of July in perhaps his most famous speech “What to the slave is the 4th of July?” Douglass’s speech follows the logic of his life, a literate man, who escaped bondage to tell his own story in memoir and thousands of speeches across the country, to make the case for the application of the unalienable natural rights described in the Declaration of Independence to the part of the American population still held in brutal bondage. Join the School for a conversation about Douglass’s rhetorical and moral campaign to compel the United States to live up to its own political principles.