Frederick Douglass’ critical lesson for the 250th: ‘Contend, contend’
Frederick Douglass spent his life demanding that America live up to its principles. On the eve of the nation’s 250th birthday, his most exhausted and defiant work is his most relevant.
As the country moves toward the 250th celebration, the official directive from the Trump administration is clear: be proud, be grateful, and rejoice in our great nation. This rosy narrative overlooks the global political conflicts, fractured economy, and longstanding racial and gendered inequalities that have shaped our country from its founding. These difficult realities are not footnotes to American history but a reminder of all of the ways that our nation continues to fail to live up to its espoused values. This is why one of the greatest speeches in American history resonates this time of year and especially on the eve of our nation’s 250th birthday: Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
Born into slavery, Frederick Douglass escaped from bondage to become the foremost African American abolitionist, orator, and intellectual of the nineteenth century. His famous “Fourth of July” speech is a profound declaration of faith in the promise of America and its “saving principles.” In this speech, delivered pointedly on July 5, 1852, not July 4, in Rochester, New York, Douglass argues that the foundations of American democracy are not fundamentally rotten, just mistaken in their implementation, and that the values enshrined in the founding mythology and documents might yet redeem America from its sins. It is a galvanizing and patriotic text, and it anticipates what W.E.B. Du Bois would say in 1935 in Black Reconstruction in America: that “democracy died save in the hearts of Black folk.”
But this year, a different piece by Douglass resonates: “The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition,” written in 1893, just two years before he died. In that pamphlet, Douglass criticizes another national commemoration that asked Americans to set aside painful realities in favor of a more flattering narrative. His argument—that the struggle against racial injustice must continue not because success is guaranteed, or even likely, but because it is the right thing to do when confronted with injustice—continues to matter today.
In this pamphlet, Douglass protested the World’s Fair in Chicago, a grand celebration of the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s 1492 arrival in the “New World.” The fair, Douglass argued, distorted American history by erasing the contributions of Black Americans whose labor and suffering had made that very “progress” possible. By this time, Douglass had witnessed the Emancipation Proclamation and Reconstruction and the violent undoing of Reconstruction. He had seen the Supreme Court strike down the Civil Rights Act of 1875. As white Americans imposed the brutal logic of Jim Crow across the nation, Douglass came to believe that the consciences he had spent his life appealing to had been so corrupted by white supremacy that they could no longer be relied on to redeem America.
And yet, in the closing passages of the pamphlet, Douglass did not embrace despair or advocate for retreat. Instead, he offered the metaphor of a ship that must embrace the dangers of the open sea. The ship might remain safely anchored in harbor but this safety, he argued, is deceptive. The ship must weather the storm. And he followed it up with something even more profound: “Next to victory is the glory and happiness of…contending for it. Therefore, contend, contend! That we should have to contend and strive for what is freely conceded to other citizens without effort or demand may indeed be a hardship, but there is compensation here as elsewhere. Contest is itself ennobling. A life devoid of purpose and earnest effort is a worthless life. Conflict is better than stagnation.” For Douglass, the act of contending itself is meaningful. The struggle testifies to the injustice it intends to repair.
The origins and reception of the pamphlet reveal the fault lines in American society at the end of the 19th century. Douglass had appealed to Black communities across the nation for funds to print the pamphlet and had received almost nothing. Discouraged, he told his collaborator, Ida B. Wells, that he wanted to abandon the effort. It was Wells who insisted otherwise, organizing with many Black women’s organizations to raise the necessary resources. Ironically, the man who would close his pamphlet urging Black Americans to “contend, contend” had to be persuaded to continue contending himself.
The reception of the pamphlet was divided and harsh. Many prominent white journalists called Douglass a complainer. Even within the Black press, there was hardly consensus. Some Black journalists endorsed his indictment of the fair while others argued that Black economic and educational enfranchisement were more important than another lament of prejudice. This was a broader debate within the Black community that Douglass did not settle in the pamphlet. What he offered instead was something harder and arguably more important today: the argument that we must continue to fight even when we are not winning the war.
This is an extraordinary argument coming from Douglass at the end of his life. He had every reason to give up the fight. He had spent decades working to change America, and America had proven far more resistant to that change than he had originally hoped. And yet he insisted: contend, contend.
At this moment of democratic fracture and racial retrenchment in America, Douglass’s argument deserves a second hearing. The Supreme Court has dismantled affirmative action, executive orders have unraveled federal civil rights commitments, and disparities in housing, education, healthcare, and criminal justice persist and deepen. The fight against racial injustice must continue not because we can be assured of our triumph but because our commitment to America’s “saving principles” should not falter even when those principles seem out of reach. Douglass’s refusal to abandon the fight—his willingness to steer into the storm—is not merely a biographical detail about an American at the end of his life. It is an argument about what it means to celebrate America and her saving principles.
Happy 250th birthday, America. Contend, contend.
Dr. Amy Gais is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Comparative Literature and Thought at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of The Coerced Conscience (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and is currently working on a book project on dissimulation, resistance, and freedom in African American political thought.
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