After suffering the overwhelming savagery and inhumanity of being a slave for over two decades, a black man named Fredrick Douglass escaped slavery and began performing concerts concerted effort to progress as a human being. Battling many obstacles and resisting numerous temptations, Douglass worked assiduously to become a skilled gentleman rather than the involuntary alternative of being an unenlightened slave. In doing so, Douglass successfully established himself as one of the most important anti-slavery orators of the Civil War era. From his first major public speech at age 23, Douglass became widely known as the leading spokesperson for black slaves and the movement to abolish slavery. In one of Douglass's most distinguished speeches, “The Meaning of the Fourth of July to the Negro,” he uses the intermittent opportunity to speak on behalf of African Americans to a multitude of white Americans to outline arguments against slavery. In that very speech, Douglass made it clear that, like countless African Americans during that time, Douglass had the primary goal of questioning the validity of the Fourth of July celebration while there were still many injustices in practice. He wanted to make it clear to the public that it was a mockery to expect or even invite African Americans to take part in the Fourth of July celebration because it was not their place to celebrate. His goal shaped his speech dramatically. This allowed him to surface the history behind the Fourth of July and ask why the ideologies that led to the nation's liberation were not used to free the slaves. He was trying to persuade the whites present, but also to remind all the African Americans present that the Fourth of July, like many other American traditions, was not theirs.