In 1852, Fredrick Douglass asked a painful question: what, to the slave, is the Fourth of July?
"Two hundred and fifty years later we are still challenged by the spirit of Douglass’s question," Wheatley Fellow Bradley Rebeiro writes. "Is the Declaration for all of us?"
Rebeiro argues that, today, Douglass would say it does. "Most Americans know Douglass as a formerly enslaved man who became one of the 19th century’s most influential political actors," Rebeiro says. "His voice of moral clarity helped force a nation to come to terms with its unjust practices...yet few know that Douglass was a profound constitutional thinker, someone who believed the Constitution, properly interpreted, would ultimately undermine slavery.” In Douglass' mind, the problem was not the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution; the documents and their ideals gave him hope. Instead, he condemned Americans who failed to live up to the ideals espoused by their founding documents.
Does the Declaration belong to all of us? Yes, Reberio states. "The better question to ask, then, is whether we are living up to what the Declaration demands of us today."