The words of abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ famed 1852 address, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” rung out through Worcester Common on Thursday afternoon, read by dozens of different people. Each person read about a paragraph of the speech, which addressed the extreme inequality the holiday laid bare in pre-Civil War America.
“Your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to (an American slave), mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes that would disgrace a nation of savages,” Douglass wrote.
Douglass forced the nation to come face to face with the “immeasurable distance” that separated free whites and enslaved Black people 76 years after the…
