The Mitchell Center for African American Heritage invites you to experience a masterful delivery of one of Frederick Douglass’s most powerful and well-known speeches, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” by actor Carlo Campbell.
Originally given in 1852, this speech was revised and recited by Douglass numerous times in the years before, during, and after the Civil War. With each rendition, the words took on new meaning for Americans during a period of rapid change and constant upheaval, as the nation struggled to define the freedoms it had pursued during the American Revolutionary War less than a century earlier.
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