Babz Rawls-Ivy, Erik Clemons, David Blight, and Walter O. Evans kept a Fourth of July tradition going — by reading Frederick Douglass’s 1852 Oration, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July.”
Yale’s Beinecke Library traditionally holds a public reading of the letter on Independence Day. (Read more about the letter here.)
Due to Covid-19, this year Beinecke recorded local leaders doing the reading at the Institute Library, then put it on Youtube, in installments. Which we present here.
The ideals of the Declaration of Independence meant a great deal to slaves in Massachusetts when the idea that all men where free and equal was incorporated into the Sheffield Resolves and the state's new Constitution. A woman call Mumbet listened to the words, and asked, what about me? A lawyer named Sedgewick answered, yes, it should apply to you. With Tapping Reeve's help, he persuaded the Supreme Judicial Court to rule that the new consitution freed all slaves in the state.
https://www.masshist.org/endofslavery/index.php?id=54