“What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” was the question about 40 Somerville residents posed for themselves for the city’s eighth annual “Reading Frederick Douglass Together” event, which took place at Premiere on Broadway.
The public reading of Douglass’s famous 1852 speech was organized by the Somerville Museum, Somerville’s Department of Racial and Social Justice and the Somerville Arts Council. It was funded through a grant from Mass Humanities, which has helped organizations and communities across the Commonwealth host public readings of Douglass’s speech since 2009. This year has seen a record number of readings scheduled, 76, between May 30 and September 12.
Reading speeches of Douglass and other important African Americans has been a tradition in the Black community for decades, perhaps a century, said Latoya Bosworth, program officer at The Holyoke-based nonprofit Mass Humanities and coordinator of the “Reading Frederick Douglass” program. The expanded interest this year is probably driven by it being the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, effectively the birth of the United States, Bosworth said. “People find themselves asking in private conversations, or at tables, or in community spaces about what it means to be free and what democracy means,” she said.
In addition to grants ranging from $1,000 to $1,800, Mass Humanities provides guides, discussion materials and webinars to assist organizers.
Stephanie Marlin-Curiel, executive director of the Somerville Museum since 2024, agreed that the anniversary had created a sense of reckoning. “I’m grateful for the independence and ideas that set this country in motion, but we have a lot to do to make those ideals a reality for everyone,” she said.
The speech, read by Douglass in 1852 at the former Corinthian Hall in Upstate New York, questions what the freedom professed in the U.S. Constitution and celebrated on Independence Day meant for Black Americans in his time – many of whom were enslaved. It nonetheless extended praise to the nation’s founders.
Revisiting a “rich inheritance”
“The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me,” reads an excerpt from the speech, which was recited in full over the course of roughly an hour, with about a dozen volunteers taking turns.
Leading this year’s reading was Christian Walkes, who recently received his PhD in education at Harvard University and is the former director of education and interpretation at the Museum of African American History.
Walkes told Cambridge Day that it was important to continue holding similar public readings and to keep reflecting on Douglass’s words because he sees “parallels” reemerging from the past, as Black history, texts and books are increasingly being challenged and removed from public school curricula. “As soon as we forget [his words], we’re bound to repeat the same sort of injustices he was speaking about nearly 174 years ago.”
After the speech was read, attendees were invited to transform their copies of it into “blackout” poems by crossing out or redacting portions of the text to reveal new compositions. Cambridge Day joined a Somerville couple, Kathleen and her husband, and reworked an excerpt to read, “Oppression makes a man mad, the victim of grievous wrongs. Just here, the idea of a total separation was born! It was a startling idea.”
Kathleen said she and her husband felt it was important to be there to learn about U.S. history, and to “talk about the injustices [that exist].”
Public art at Trum Field
Accompanying the event was “Switchboard”, an art installation created by Sophie Tachibana Miller and hung on the fencing of Trum Field. It featured Ruth Valetta Jones positioned near a telephone switchboard displaying excerpts from both the Declaration of Independence and Douglass’s speech. Jones was a grandniece of Frederick Douglass, the first Black woman to graduate from Somerville High School, and one of the first women to professionally operate a telephone and to vote in Cambridge.
The interactive installation has been displayed at several locations around town, including in front of the Somerville Museum. It allowed passersby to physically make their own connections between phrases by linking them with rope.
Those engaging with the art could also write reflections on attached cardstock tags. One had linked the phrase “all men are created equal” to a tag saying, “by showing up!”
The reading is part of the museum’s semiquincentennial programming, during which it has explored the city’s history and especially its overlooked stories. For one, the “Let Freedom Ring” project has placed five replicas of the first residential telephone in the world at historical sites around town to commemorate the places and people who have helped define freedom in Somerville. The Charles Williams, Jr. House at One Arlington Road was the first home to have a telephone installed, back in 1877.
Somerville’s pre-Independence Day festival and fireworks event took place after the reading.
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