April 21: President of the United States, Robert Hayden, "Frederick Douglass"

Quote from Donald Trump:  “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice."

Now, I am not going to talk about how abominably illiterate the current President of the United States is.  He doesn't know history or literature or art or government.  No, I'm not going to talk about that tonight.

Saint Marty is going to let a person who knows something about Frederick Douglass have the last word:

Frederick Douglass

by:  Robert Hayden

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful

and terrible thing, needful to man as air,   

usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,   

when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,   

reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more   

than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:   

this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro   

beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world   

where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,   

this man, superb in love and logic, this man   

shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,   

not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,

but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives   

fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.