On July 1, the Benjamin Cushing Community Center in Marion was the venue for a first-of-its-kind event: a community reading of Frederick Douglass’ July 4, 1852, speech. The event was hosted by the Marion Art Center, Tri-Town Against Racism and the Marion Council on Aging.
Before the community reading, keynote speaker Dr. Moise Saint-Louis, interim associate vice chancellor for Student Affairs and director of the Frederick Douglass Unity House, set the stage by giving the audience members context.
Who was Frederick Douglass? How did his agency help to frame the Abolition Movement? But moreover, how did his very life, his work, his struggles help the world to comprehend the true horror of slavery during his lifetime to the present?
Saint-Louis said, “His insistence that there should be no slave in a nation that claims all men were created equal, no three-fifths of a human being in a nation that professes the inalienable rights of all … his demand that the nation should live up to its creed and ideals, that, we, should live up to them, provide us with a historical framework for understanding every social movement, every call for justice and equity, and every struggle for rights and fairness in our nation’s history.”
When Douglass gave his speech regarding Independence Day, he was not fully a free man. Although he had managed to escape his enslaver, finding some semblance of freedom in the north, he had to pay his former master, pay for the release of his very body from legalized bondage before he could breathe freely. Yet he still was not considered a whole human being.
“The Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850,” Saint-Louis reminded the assembled. The result was a perpetuation of slavery. He spoke to Douglass’ first-hand knowledge of the crimes against humanity he witnessed and experienced as a slave. He reminded us of the cruelty wrought on people of color: rape, murder and total exploitation.
Slaves represented an engine that fueled the American economy, and white slave owners were not giving that up easily. Keeping black people in a category of living beings that was not 100% human justified their imprisonment.
After Saint-Louis ended his rousing speech, 15 members of the community, a group of volunteers from around the area, began reading Douglass’ speech. The group represented a wide swath of society, young, older, male, female, black, white. It was moving to witness young black men and women speaking the lines written by a hero of justice for all. It was unifying to see white, senior citizens nearly brought to tears as they spoke iconic lines of the former slave.
The Douglass speech does not pull any punches.
“The crack you heard, was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard, was from the woman you saw with the babe. Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains! That gash on her shoulder tells her to move on. Follow the drove to New Orleans. Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers. See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude. Tell me citizens, WHERE, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Yet this is but a glance at the American slave-trade, as it exists, at this moment, in the ruling part of the United States.”
Douglass implored his audience 171 years ago to “…look in the mirror.” Saint-Louis echoed that charge.
By Marilou Newell