What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?
"Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them."
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/What_to_the_Slave_Is_the_Fourth_of_July%3F
"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: 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 sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour. "
"Let this damning fact be perpetually told. Let it be thundered around the world, that, in tyrant-killing, king-hating, people-loving, democratic, Christian America, the seats of justice are filled with judges, who hold their offices under an open and palpable bribe, and are bound, in deciding in the case of a man's liberty, to hear only his accusers!"
I acquired the habit of reading this speech to mark the anniversary of this country's declaration of its independence from a former co-worker who has many affectations I find aggravating. But this one, I like and have taken for myself.
@SnoopJ thanks for posting this classic. For those tempted to think "but slavery is over," please note that this fits word for word if you replace "slave" with "person in ICE custody", or with "person sentenced to 20+ years in prison for carrying a box of anarchist zines", or with "person kidnapped from a foreign country and detained indefinitely offshore without legal rights", or with "3-year-old representing themselves in immigration court after being taken away from their parents", or with "member of a federally unrecognized Indigenous tribe whose surrender treaty Congress refused to sign", or with "member of an Indigenous tribe whose treaty right to clean air and water has been ignored for generations", or with "person whose bodily autonomy and doctor's recommendation have been overruled by the government", or with any number of other descriptors for today's victims of American Imperialism.
@tiotasram to say nothing of the crimes against humanity perpetuated in the immediate wake of the 'official' end of slavery which continue to this very day