Ted Littleford
Babz Rawls-Ivy, Erik Clemons, David Blight, and Walter O. Evans kept a Fourth of July tradition going — by reading Frederick Douglass’s 1852 Oration, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July.”
Yale’s Beinecke Library traditionally holds a public reading of the letter on Independence Day. (Read more about the letter here.)
Due to Covid-19, this year Beinecke recorded local leaders doing the reading at the Institute Library, then put it on Youtube, in installments. Which we present here.