“I have no love for America, as such; I have no patriotism. I have no country. What country have I? The institutions of this country do not know me – do not recognise me as a man. I am not thought of or spoken of except as a piece of property. Now, in such a country as this I cannot have patriotism.”
The words are spoken by The Harder They Fall actor Jonathan Majors, wearing a hoodie before a bare brick wall, at the opening of Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches, an HBO documentary that makes a case that the fugitive slave turned celebrity abolitionist was also one of America’s great prose poets.
