“What to the American slave is your 4th of July? 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.”
— Frederick Douglass, The Meaning of 4th of July for the Negro (full text here)
(Taken with instagram)
Me by Derek at his family’s cottage. It was closed up for the season so we crept around, peeking in windows, taking pictures on the beach and dreaming of future summers. Those were some of the most middle class sentences I have ever said and this is the most middle class I have ever looked.
