The address titled “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” focuses on the hypocrisy of America celebrating its freedom while hundreds of African Americans remained enslaved and in bondage.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th 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.

By 1819, the year in which Krimmel exhibited Fourth of July Celebration in Centre Square, the event had become a largely white working class celebration, in contrast to earlier years when blacks ...