WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The town's Fourth of July celebration reminded all of a "self-evident truth" not included in the Declaration of Independence: Throughout the nation's history, what some call "American exceptionalism" has unjustly excepted millions of people.

 

On the balcony of Williams College's Chapin Library, actors from the Williamstown Theatre Festival read the July 4 Declaration, a September 1776 reply from the British government, the 1787 Preamble to the Constitution, and excerpts from an 1852 speech by abolitionist Frederick Douglass titled "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?"

 

"I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim," actor LeRoy McClain delivered Douglass' words.

 

"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 denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; 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."

 

Douglass' reminder to all, 122 years after his death, is that America still has ways to go to answer the Constitution's call for a "more perfect union."

 

Williamstown's Independence Day celebration included all the traditional elements, including the annual town parade, and a new wrinkle, the launch of fireworks at Taconic Golf Club.

 

For the most part, the mood was one of celebrating country and enjoying what has been called America's "secular holy day."

 

But the politics of the age were not completely absent.

 

At the morning's parade, a member of the Board of Selectmen donned a T-shirt reading "Dissent is Patriotic"; the contingent from First Congregational Church carried a placard calling for environmental justice, a Black Lives Matter sign and a rainbow flag associated with LGBTQ rights; and a spectator placed a sign at the curbside of Spring Street declaring that "America Is Under Attack."

 

During the reading of the Declaration of Independence, the crowd of several hundred outside Chapin Library burst into spontaneous applause a couple of times, notably on passages assailing King George III for "obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither," and for being "[a] prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."

 

But for all America's real or perceived injustices, past or present, Douglass' speech included another reminder: that in the U.S. Constitution there is the potential to correct the nation's flaws and establish the justice that the Preamble makes an imperative.

 

"In that instrument, I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing [slavery]; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a glorious liberty document," Douglass said. "Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither."