On July 5, 1852, over a decade before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Frederick Douglass delivered a keynote address at an Independence Day event. “What, to the American slave, is the Fourth of July?” Douglass asked . “A day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your