Danny Glover Reads Frederick Douglass

This is a video of Danny Glover reading a speech from Frederick Douglass. There is a quote that in the speech that states:

 "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 sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, 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 the United States, at this very hour."

When these words escaped the speakers of my computer and leaked into my ears I felt a shiver run up and down my spine. I'm more then certain that there were plenty of freed slaves speaking out for the behalf of their brothers and sisters throughout the nation but, nothing was worded as precisely as Mr. Douglasses speech to convey an image so sharp that even the the most conservative white man during this time had to have felt a tickle of dismay. Nevermind the cruelty that Americans pushed upon the slaves but, focus on the irony; Americans (white male Americans for that matter) celebrate liberty, a fraudulent liberty. America was supposedly built on a system of freedom and established a list of Amendments setting in stone the rights of each human being residing in this country, yet they owned fellow human beings and used them as if they were less than an animal and more of a machine stripping them of their rights. Sure Frederick Douglass spoke out but, he was not practicing the first amendment because this didnt exist for him and others like him he spoke out through courage. Many freed slaves and abolitionists who voiced and published their opinions were murdered for these actions...