(HOST) This summer the Rokeby Museum in Ferrisburg is featuring recordings of eight pivotal speeches by American abolitionists. Commentator and executive director of the Vermont Humanities Council Peter Gilbert says that one of them seems especially relevant today - as the Fourth of July approaches.

(GILBERT) Frederick Douglass was a former slave turned eloquent author and prominent abolitionist. On July 5, 1852, he spoke near his home in Rochester, New York at an event commemorating the Declaration of Independence.

To hear an actor deliver those powerful words at the Rokeby Museum brings to mind contemporary discussions of race in America, varieties of patriotism, and attitudes of today's white middle-income voters.

Douglass begins his remarks respectfully, calling the signers of the Declaration of Independence brave men - quote - "statesmen, patriots, and heroes... great men, too, great enough to give frame to a great age." Although he acknowledges that "the point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable," he honors their memory, noting that he "cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration."

But then Douglass asks why he was asked to speak, and what he, or those still in slavery whom he represents, have to do with national independence. "This Fourth [of] July," he asserts, "is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony." And he asks, "Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?" Douglass asserts that to a slave, July Fourth is "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. He continues that to a slave, "your celebration is a sham, . . . a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages." And he says that to a slave, "your boasted liberty [is] an unholy license, your national greatness, swelling vanity."

But Frederick Douglass concludes his speech by saying that, despite the continued existence of slavery, he does not despair of the country because America's history of race is not static and unchanging. There are, he says, "forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. . ." They include the abolitionist movement, but also, he says, "tendencies of the age" - global commerce, a decline in national isolation, the spread of knowledge from the few to the many, and the spread of intelligence across the globe. And so, he says, he concludes where he began, with hope.

Our younger daughter's middle name is Hope. People sometimes ask me whether it's a family name. I say, no, just a good idea. Whether it's hope expressed by Senator Obama, Senator McCain, or others, hope is faith in progress, a conviction that things can change for the better. Admittedly, mere hope is not a strategy, but it is essential. For without hope comes despair, and we know from events both at home and abroad, that despairing people - people who believe they have nothing
to lose - can do terrible things.