As the nation approaches Independence Day, many will reflect on Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech, “What to the Slave is the 4th of July” — a text that calls out the United States for the hypocrisy of celebrating freedom from Britain while holding millions of Black people in bondage.
“With brave men,” Douglass said, “there is always a remedy for oppression.”
At the time Douglass delivered his speech, white Americans were marking the nation’s 76th anniversary. But most Black Americans were enslaved, and all lived under the threat of the Fugitive Slave Law that denied their basic human rights and even their very humanity. Nevertheless, enslaved Blacks courageously continued to risk their lives to escape their oppression, and they were aided by abolitionists who bravely defied the immoral law by helping them escape to Canada.
A decade after Douglass’s speech criticized a nation that professed to be built on tenets of freedom and equality while enslaving an entire group of people, hundreds of thousands would die in a bloody quest to end slavery. Among the casualties of the American Civil War were escaped slaves who chose to risk their lives fighting for freedom. For them, taking up arms was the remedy to their oppression.
Five years after the Civil War ended, the US extended the right to vote to Black men, who braved the threat of white-supremacist vigilante violence to cast ballots — violence like Louisiana’s Colfax Massacre of 1873, when white-supremacist Democrats killed at least 50 Blacks over a disputed gubernatorial election, or the 1874 Election Day massacre in Barbour County, Alabama, in which a white-supremacist paramilitary group killed seven Blacks attempting to vote and wounded at least 70 others.
The dauntlessness of the individuals who risked their lives to cast ballots under these conditions helped elect an estimated 2,000 Black men to serve in government at the local, state and federal levels.
As Blacks continued to exercise their power despite the threats, some…