Kristin duBay Horton and the Marblehead Racial Justice Team are planning a special community reading of a speech by famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass … and they’re asking you to participate. The event is scheduled for Monday, Nov. 18, 6:30 p.m. at Abbot Library.
“We want to gather the community. I do hope it’s a wide swath of Marbleheaders who will come together and read,” duBay Horton told the Current.
Douglass delivered his speech, “What to the American Slave is Your Fourth of July,” as a free man at an Independence Day celebration in Rochester, New York, in 1852.
“What he wanted people to understand is that for a lot of people there was still no freedom,” duBay Horton explained. “We hope this begins a discussion about feeling othered in Marblehead. If we begin to think about it that way then everyone can understand. Everyone has a space where they are different from everyone else. We should ask, ‘What can I do to make other people comfortable when they come into Marblehead?’ Because everyone belongs in Marblehead.”…