Clarence Page: Britain’s identity crisis — and ours

Sorting out my own grief over the death of Queen Elizabeth II, I feel some of what I imagine Frederick Douglass felt when he wrote his historic speech titled “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July.”

Douglass had escaped slavery to become a journalist, orator, statesman and friend of a president, Abraham Lincoln.

“This Fourth of July is yours, not mine,” Douglass told an abolitionist audience in 1852 a decade before the Civil War.