Read by James Earl Jones[edit] Mr. President, Fellow Citizens,Years ago, the people of this country were British subjects. The style and title of your "sovereign people" (in which you now glory) was not then born, but your fathers, who had not adopted the fashionable idea of this day, of the infallibility of government, presumed to differ from the government. They who did so were accounted plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers.

The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. In their admiration of liberty, they lost sight of all other interests. They were peace men, but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men, but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They believed in order, but not in the order of tyranny.

Their solid manhood stands out the more as we contrast it with these degenerate times. Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. Above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. To forget them, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason.

The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; 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 sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, 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.

Your broad republican domain is hunting ground for men, not for thieves and robbers, enemies of society, merely, but for men guilty of no crime. Your law-makers have commanded citizens to engage in this hellish sport. The right of the hunter to his prey stands superior to all rights in this republic! You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of millions of your countrymen. You hurl anathemas at the tyrants of Russia while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and body-guards of tyrants. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad, but the fugitives from oppression in your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot, and kill.

You declare before the world that you "hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; and that among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"; and yet, you hold securely in bondage, which according to your own Thomas Jefferson, "is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose," the inhabitants of your country.