Read this excerpt from "The Hypocrisy of American Slavery" by Frederick Douglass, a former slave and a leader of the abolitionist movement. Whom
does the speaker address in this speech?
What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of 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 shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mock; 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 of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and
bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.
Go search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every
abuse and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for
revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
A.
all residents of the United States
B.
all the nations of the world
C.
the white population of the United States
D.
African Americans still under slavery
E.
leaders of the Southern states