No one better understood the yawning gap between America’s avowed principles and actual practice at the time than Frederick Douglass, a freed Black, abolitionist, orator, and author. In his most famous 1851 speech “What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?”, Douglass called out American slavery as a grotesquely unconstitutional—and unjust—institution at odds with fundamental American values. He praised America’s commitments but denounced its hypocrisy, offering a respectful and respectable balance of patriotism and pushback, one that all Americans should strive for