HONORING FREDERICK DOUGLASS

On 2026-06-30, Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA-7) delivered a floor speech titled "HONORING FREDERICK DOUGLASS" in the House.

HONORING FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Congressional Record, Volume 172 Issue 109 (Tuesday, June 30, 2026) [Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 109 (Tuesday, June 30, 2026)] [House] [Pages H4353-H4354] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [ www.gpo.gov ] HONORING FREDERICK DOUGLASS (Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2025, Ms. Pressley of Massachusetts is recognized for the remainder of the hour as the designee of the minority leader.) Ms. PRESSLEY. Mr. Speaker, in 1852, Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist, orator, and formerly enslaved man, delivered one of America's most famous speeches: ``What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?'' He addressed a nation celebrating freedom while denying it to millions. With moral clarity and urgency, he exposed the stark contradiction between America's founding ideals and the lived reality of Black people, calling out a democracy that had excluded those who it claimed to liberate. As our Nation celebrates its 250-year anniversary, that tension still resonates. Black Americans continue to confront systemic inequities that have been legislated and codified. Douglass' words endure as both a mirror and a mandate, revealing uncomfortable truths while urging us to fight for an America as good as its promise. Before I begin, I recognize and thank Mass Humanities for sustaining this vital tradition through public readings of Douglass' speech across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, ensuring that its message continues to educate, challenge, and inspire new generations. Now, I invite you to listen and to consider these words not as distant history but as a call to action today. ``What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?'' Mr. President, Friends, and Fellow Citizens: The task before me is one which requires much previous thought and study for its proper performance. The papers and placards say that I am to deliver a Fourth of July oration. This certainly sounds large, and out of the common way, for it is true that I have often had the privilege to speak in this beautiful Hall, and to address many who now honor me with their presence. The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable--and the difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former are by no means slight. That I am here today is, to me, a matter of astonishment as well as of gratitude. This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the Fourth of July. It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance. This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national life; and reminds you that the Republic of America is now 76 years old. I am glad, fellow-citizens, that your nation is so young. You are, even now, only in the beginning of your national career, still lingering in the period of childhood. I repeat, I am glad this is so. There is hope in the thought, and hope is much needed, under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon. Fellow-citizens, the simple story is that, 76 years ago, the people of this country were British subjects. The style and title of your ``sovereign people'' (in which you now glory) was not then born. You were under the British Crown. Your fathers esteemed the English Government as the home government. England as the fatherland, although a considerable distance from your home, impose, in the exercise of its parental prerogatives, upon its colonial children such restraints, burdens and limitations, as, in its mature judgment, it deemed wise, right, and proper. But your fathers, who had not adopted the idea of the infallibility of government, and the absolute character of its acts, presumed to differ from the home government in respect to the wisdom and the justice of some of those burdens and restraints. They went so far as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submitted to. I scarcely need say, fellow-citizens, that my opinion of those measures fully accords with that of your fathers. Feeling themselves harshly and unjustly treated by the home government, your fathers, like men of honesty, and men of spirit, earnestly sought redress. They petitioned and remonstrated; they did so in a decorous, respectful, and loyal manner. This, however, did not answer the purpose. They saw themselves treated with sovereign indifference, coldness, and scorn. Oppression makes a wise man mad. Your fathers became restive under this treatment. They felt themselves the victims of grievous wrongs, wholly incurable in their colonial capacity. With brave men there is always a remedy for oppression. Just here, the idea of a total separation of the colonies from the crown was born! It was a startling idea, much more so, than we, at this distance of time, regard it. The timid and the prudent of that day, were, of course, shocked and alarmed by it. Their opposition to the then- dangerous thought was earnest and powerful; but, amid all their terror and affrighted vociferations against it, the alarming and revolutionary idea moved on, and the country with it. {time} 1850 On the Second of July, 1776, the old Continental Congress, to the dismay of the lovers of ease, and the worshippers of property, clothed that dreadful idea with all the authority of national sanction. They did so in the form of a resolution. We seldom hit upon resolutions, drawn up in our day, whose transparency is at all equal it: ``Resolved, That these united colonies are, and of right, ought to be free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown.'' Citizens, your fathers made good that resolution. They succeeded; and today you reap the fruits of their success. The freedom gained is yours; and you, therefore, may properly celebrate this anniversary. The Fourth of July is the first great fact in your nation's history--the very ring-bolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny. My business, if I have any here today, is with the present. The accepted time with God and his cause is the ever-living now. We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future. Now is the time, the important time. Your fathers have lived, died, and have done their work, and have done much of it well. You live and must die, and you must do your work. You have no right to enjoy a child's share in the labor of your fathers, unless your children are to be blest by your labors. You have no right to wear out and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence. Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? 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? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to 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. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today? Fellow citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics, from the slave's point of view. Standing here identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the [[Page H4354]] present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery--the great sin and shame of America! ``I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;'' I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just. I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, and denounce less, would you persuade more, and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government.