Recall those denied their share of the Fourth

In a remarkable address to the people of Rochester, New York, in 1852, on the occasion of the city's annual Fourth of July celebration, the escaped slave and noted anti-slavery orator Frederick Douglass gave one of the most moving speeches of his career, a speech which has surprising relevance to today.

He spoke for the dispossessed.

Douglass posed a poignant question. After appropriate apologies for perhaps offending his hosts and his audience, he asked dramatically, "What to the slave is the Fourth of July?"

And in answering his own question, he spoke words that have come to represent our current understanding of slavery and its place in American society. The Fourth of July was, he said, a day that to the slave, more than all other days, manifested the gross injustice and cruelty to which he was the constant victim.

The celebration, he said, was a sham, and the bloated liberty of his audience an unholy license. Proclamations of national greatness, he insisted, were a swelling vanity.

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It is perhaps remarkable this speech was little known and effectively lost in obscurity until recently. Only with the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, and the reshaping of the concept of American equality to include minorities, and with that movement, the reconstructing of our national history, was this speech rediscovered.

It is now reasonably well known to students of American history; not long ago it was included in a PBS documentary on the history of American slavery. Where before its sentiment was unspoken, because it was unwanted and inconsistent with the way Americans understood their culture — it now lives, in the context of a new understanding of that history, as an understanding that accepts race has been a permanent challenge in American culture, and to meet its challenge, we must acknowledge its systemic, historical impact on American lives.

There are surely Alaska Natives who have felt similarly about their denigration in Alaska's past by the majority, dominant culture here.

Tlingit and Haida people were famously not asked about America's purchase of the Alaska territory from Russia in 1867. Nor were any other Alaska Natives.

One historian found a report saying some of the Tlingit people at Sitka watched from canoes in the bay as the transfer ceremony took place on Castle Hill.

To expect Americans in the middle of the 19th century to have taken seriously any Native protest about the ownership of Alaska land is unreasonable and anachronistic.

By the conventions of the time, nations recognized and accepted the Russian claim of sovereignty over Alaska.

The way the dominant culture viewed indigenous people then was essentially the same as the American view of African American slaves that Frederick Douglass criticized in his Rochester address: They were assumed to lack the capacity to become competent and equal citizens.

There were protestors who, like Douglass, criticized and attacked that view, but they were few.

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Culture is dynamic: it is constantly evolving. The path from the 1857 Dred Scott U.S. Supreme Court decision that slaves were not persons, from the 1887 congressional act establishing forced acculturation of Natives, from the 1896 high court decision legitimizing segregation, from these and other official actions now regarded as nefarious, to the recognition and embrace of the equality of all people we proclaim today, however incomplete and unfinished it may be, is a history of positive, practical progress toward an enlightened ideal.

It is progress worthy of commemoration.

Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924. In 1946 it established an Indian Claims Commission to hear land claims cases. In 1954 the Supreme Court found segregation to be a violation of the U.S. Constitution.

In 1959 the U.S. Court of Federal Claims found that in 1867 the Tlingit and Haida people owned Southeast Alaska, not the Russians, and in 1968 the court agreed to payment of compensation. In 1971 Congress passed the landmark Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.

There were flaws in each of these official acts. But they marked positive, evolving change.

On the Fourth of July this sesquicentennial year in Alaska, it's fitting to remember such markers and to reflect on the progress made from Douglass' time to now — and on the work still to be done.

Steve Haycox is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

The views expressed here are the writer's and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary@alaskadispatch.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@alaskadispatch.com.