Freedom Day

On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered his speech "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” to a gathering of 500-600 abolitionists in Rochester, N.Y. In part; he said:

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?...

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions!...

But, such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. — The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.

It was nearly 13 years later that Gen. Gordon Granger arrived with Union soldiers in Galveston, Texas, and announced to enslaved Africans Americans that the Civil War had ended and they were free.

On this day we celebrate "Juneteenth" or "Freedom Day" -- the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States. There is no day more fitting to rededicate ourselves to the ideals of equality, and to fully realize the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all.