West Medford Community Center hosts annual Fredrick Douglass reading
The holiday gains a broader meaning with the reading of Douglass's famous Fourth of July speech
By Tavishi Chattopadhyay
More than 50 people gathered at the West Medford Community Center (WMCC) on Saturday, July 11, for the third annual reading of Frederick Douglass’s famous Fourth of July speech and to celebrate the center as it unveiled a new mural and the fact it received $50,000 for serving its community so well for 90 years.
In the main room of the center, people took turns reading Frederick Douglass’s “The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro.” The speech was delivered by Douglass in 1852 and speaks about how the positive American values, such as liberty and freedom, were not afforded to slaves.
Readings like this have been done across the state since 2009 as part of an effort funded by the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities (MFH). MFH started the grant program to help communities consider “the meaning of the speech in the past and its resonance in the present.”
"The same issues Fredrick Douglass raised are still with us now," said Rev. David Kilpatrick, who led the invocation for the event.
WMCC Director of Elder Services Terry Carter gave the welcome address and emphasized that the event speaks to the idea that you can “do more together than apart.”
Donna McElroy, professor emeritus at Berklee School of Music, performed, “Soon I Will Be Done with the Troubles of the World."
And, Mass. State Rep. Sean Garballey presented the center with a proclamation recognizing it for its 90 years of service to the community and awarding it $50,000 from the state budget.
The money was an acknowledgement of the work the center does, Carter said.
“We got to earn it to spend it,” he said.
Carter then showed a diagram of a slave ship before beginning to recite his poem called, “Slave Ship Soliloquy.”
"It's as if you truly believe that if you cannot see, then it cannot be,” he read.
The audience joined in a performance of “Lift Every Voice and Sing," led by McElroy, before speakers came up to read their passages of Douglass’s address.
Brian Collins started the readings, and they ended with a collective reading of the final passage.
For Kilpatrick, the diversity represented in the crowd spoke to the diversity of Medford as a whole.
Terésa J. Carter, wife of Terry Carter, has been to four of these readings, three in West Medford and one on the Boston Common, and she said it helps Fourth of July celebrations to become “more than fireworks.”
"It brings a clear meaning of what the Fourth of July means to all citizens,” said Carter.
The event ended with a presentation of the mural project that is to be hung outside the center. The project was created by Susan Altman, who had been contracted by the city to create a mosaic of a symbol that represented the West Medford Community Center.
The resulting piece is a rendition of the Quonset hut that housed the first community center. Glass was used to recreate the drawing of the hut that hangs inside the center.
"It's one of the really, really wonderful things that we had this summer,” Terry Carter said.
