Are you saying that nothing has changes in 161 years?
I can easily imagine Alan Keyes delivering this speech.
Generally agree with him, but it would not have been difficult to find a country with more revolting barbarity at the time.
Shameless hypocrisy, he had a point. :)
In light of his well-reasoned and eloquent oratory, would today’s Black “leaders” accuse Frederick Douglass of acting White?
Hypocrisy requires that a person must profess a position one way while secretly holding a contrary position. In American history from the founding of the nation until the 1960’s very very few thought blacks were equal to whites. Therefore, how could people in those times be hypocrites on the issue of race? The people of those times fully expressed in word and deed that the black was not the equal of the white. It is only under the current egalitarian prejudice that hypocrisy would be a valid accusation on this issue.
Hypocrisy requires that a person must profess a position one way while secretly holding a contrary position. In American history from the founding of the nation until the 1960’s very very few thought blacks were equal to whites. Therefore, how could people in those times be hypocrites on the issue of race? The people of those times fully expressed in word and deed that the black was not the equal of the white. It is only under the current egalitarian prejudice that hypocrisy would be a valid accusation on this issue.
Frederick and Abraham Lincoln met at the White House. They personally liked each other. Frederick considered himself a Republican as did most slaves. He also spoke at Hillsdale College during its first decade as an institution.
There were plenty of barbarous places at that time (including in Africa), and members of in-groups who exploited members of out-groups -- while celebrating their own freedom or power (as had been the case throughout history).
I read Frederick Douglass's autobiography decades ago, and found some interesting things in it, but that passage and the speech in general are rhetorical excess. Freedom is not an either-or thing. It's a matter of degree. The Fourth of July represented a great step forward in its pursuit -- admittedly, for only part of the population -- and a statement of ideals that could only be approached over time.
I can understand the bitterness felt by slaves and former slaves at the thought of slaveholders celebrating freedom while so many persons were held in captivity. I agree that slavery deserved to be denounced. The ideals of the Declaration of Independence, though, were not empty words. Those ideals helped lead to the freedom of those who were still slaves. I would contend that the descendents of those American slaves are now freer and better off in general than most of the blacks in Africa (or in Haiti, where in Douglass's time they were already supposedly "free" -- from white slaveholders, anyway. Freedom isn't an either/or thing.)