For the 4th of July, the Current ran excerpts from the famous Fourth of July speech Frederick Douglass delivered in 1852. The speech is rather long, selecting excerpts was a bigger job than I thought it’d be, and I’m sure people with more expertise will object to my selections/omissions. But I wanted to run it because Trump, in addition to evidently not knowing who Frederick Douglass was, also on several occasions has demonstrated a disturbingly – and disturbingly common – white supremacist view of what the Civil War was and wasn’t about. I’ve written elsewhere about the legacy of “the quarrel forgotten” and how that mindset has hampered U.S. progress. And it’s certainly influencing Trump-GOP policy today. So, FWIW, that was part of my thinking in deciding to run a speech about U.S. slavery on the 4th on July.
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