Liz Spocott and Harriet Tubman both show similarities in their childhood. Araminta Ross (Harriet Tubman) was born around 1822 in Dorchester County, MD; she was born into slavery. Araminta changed her name from Araminta to Harriet Tubman. When Araminta was 12 years, she got between a white man and a slave, during a fight, so the slave run away and the white man threw a heavy iron weight at the slave, but instead of hitting the slave, he hit Araminta. After the traumatic blow to Harriet Tubman’s head, she started experiencing very vivid dreams and visions. Similarly, Liz Spocott lived on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the 1850s. Liz Spocott was young black woman who is a runaway slave, and she got shot in head while running away but she continued…
With regards to religion, many slave owners, such as, Zephaniah Kingsley and Judge Wilkerson believed that religious expressions were a form of independence and would threaten slave control. They believed that their slaves’ would become more empowered and have more bravery and be more difficult to handle and more disobedient. However, other slave owners believed that it should be used as an instrument of control. When slaves were actually able to attend Christian services, it was by a white minister who taught them to obey their masters in order to be saved by God. However, if they disobeyed them, they would not be saved, but destined for damnation.…
Pocahontas and John Smith both have the Standard American accents, despite John Smith being from Britain and Pocahontas being a Powhatan Native American woman. Pocahontas, the heroin of the classic Disney take of this historically depressing tale, is aesthetically pleasing to the eye like Jasmine, with beautified, striking features and long sleek hair that every young girl wishes they had. John Smith’s sharp features and blond hair beautify him as well and only enhance the stereotype that American accented people are more beautiful than non-American accented people. Ratcliffe, the evil, literal gold-digger who is in charge of the English expedition, has a thick British accent and his over-weight and…
In conclusion, black history has always been important, but never regarded as such. The education system needs to begin teaching black history the same time it begins to teach white. Although, oppression and triumph are a part of our history, black history does not begin in America. In Keisha Bentley-Edwards article, Black History Month: Change how we teach Black History, she acknowledges that black children need to know much more about who they are. “When the telling or teaching of black history begins with slavery, it ignores their humanity now, just as their humanity was denied in the past.” (Bentley-Edwards 3) Black children face enough adversity in the real world, so why not alleviate the burden by teaching them that their history does…
Terri, as a black male I felt so uncomfortable in my gut reading how black men have oppressed black females. Some of the reading was so difficult emotionally to read I felt a little sick to my stomach. The reading describing what happened on slave ships to children angered me to point of wanting to ask God why was this necessary. I began to wish I could go back in time and "wipe out" every slave owner and crew prior to picking up the first slave.…
When I hear the word slavery, the only thing that comes to my head is cruelty. I could not even imagine how a human can threat another one like animals, as if they were and inferior or less because of the skin color. The idea of being able to read a book that was written by someone that lived during this years of brutality amazed me. Harriet Jacobs was taught how to read and write by her mothers mistress, this was not common for many of the slaves, and it is the reason why she used the name “Linda” to talk about herself during her stories, because if by any chance her master knew that she could read and write, she would have had the punishment of being whipped and put in jail. During the first chapters of her book we could notice that not all her years as a slave were miserable. In fact the first six years of her life were happy, because she didn’t know she was a slave, once she grew up her innocence started to fade, her days started to turn dark and sad. As described in her book the living conditions were like hell on earth. Slavery not only affected the slaves, it also completely destroyed moral…
In learning about slavery and the society which it existed in, our interest should not be purely scientific, for we will have learned nothing of value. Rather we should have a desire to understand the insturments of oppression and its evils. If we can recogonize them then perhaps we can adapt ourselves when faced with their posion in our own lives. It is not possible to learn, in the context a college class, the horror felt by slaves nor the action or inaction which they felt necessary to take. However, as members in the long family line of the opressor class we have extensive documentation of our ancestors thoughts and actions. For me, this course aims to show us those thoughts and actions in their totality so that we may see their failures in the greater context of slavery and reflect. Tim Wise said that each and every one of us is a member of at least one dominating class. It is in those words that this course finds its greatest meaning - and if we are to learn anything this quarter it is that our status as a dominator brings with it tremendous responsibility. This is not the responsibility, as many slave owners believed, to take care of and educate the dominated as if they were too weak and foolish to survive without our guidance. But rather it is the responsibility to educate ourselves, and to that end, face oppression through the eyes of the oppressed as can only be done by…
“The Christian religion, by nature itself, cries out against the state of slavery”(Abraham Lincoln ).In the book Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl the slaves were trying to see a path to freedom by the religion they wanted to forget the dark path of slavery, and eventually they found a path to freedom with religion. Harriet jacobs talks about how slavery and church was connected and her thoughts when she saw what was going on. She saw that the slaveholders were using religion to trick the slaves into obeying their masters and not killing them. Slaves used it as hope and to free their pain of slavery.…
How grave it is for one human being to devise or seek ways to conquer another and then force them into labor that is not for their benefit. Such was the case when African Americans were forcefully bought to America to be slaves. History has shed a great deal of light on the cruelties that they faced as slaves. As much as we try to organize history and understand what they actually went through, we will never understand the totality of their broken spirits, unbearable physical pain, and the destruction of their families. To add insult to injury they were forced to worship a god that they had no knowledge of, who according to the slave owners loved them but made them slaves to serve their masters. They were also taught scriptures from the bible of their new god that justified the inhuman treatment they constantly received.…
Slavery in America was taking place from when the European’s settled to the civil war. Slave owners encouraged slaves to be very religious, not for the good of religion but so that they can focus on doing well in this life they will be rewarded in their next life. There were many slave rebellions and uprisings against their owners. Some of the rebellions were so insignificant that word never got around, others like the Nat Turner Rebellion changed history, especially because it was based on what God told Turner. This rebellion was a major turning point in history because; of the amount of slave owners killed, showing that slaves have the ability to be violent putting constant fear for every white family in the south.…
It was a hot blistering summer day not a leaf in sight or a hint of shade to be found. Mouth is dry as cotton from thirst and hands bleeding and blistering from a hard days work, exhausted from fatigue and hunger, because Master had me out here since the crack of dawn. Tending to the crops in the field and told me not come until every last crop has been tended which is about three football fields long. This is some of the Vigorous work that slaves had to endure. Slavery is a big part of American history. Many of the African Americans you see today are descendants of the 500,000 plus Africans who were sent to North America as slaves. To work the degrading lower class works of the Europeans with no wages or dignity to have. Slavery had existed in America for almost 250 years. In the United States, slaves had no rights. According to the Constitution, a slave was considered three-fifths of a person. A slave could be bought and sold just like a cow or horse. Slaves had no say in where they lived or who they worked for. They had no representation in government. Slaves could not own property and were not allowed to learn or be taught how to read and write. Slavery came to an end in 1865 when the 13th Amendment came into play after the end of the Civil War. One of those 500,000 slaves was Henry Bibb an American slave.…
Learning about our ancestors being slaves was a way to show us that we will always be enslaved. Over the years we gained our First Amendment rights, which states that we have the “right to freedom of religion, speech, and the press.” Being that the rights are printed in the constitution, it seems as though African American are not supposed to live by the constitutional laws given to us. African Americans will constantly have to fight for anything we desire to have, such as education and…
Throughout Slavery (1619-1865), Americans faced prejudice, segregation and racism. In today’s world, we as African Americans still face prejudice due to the mere color of our skin, segregation due to how we communicate with each other and racism because of our painful history.…
Thinking back on the time when people were treated as property seems like such a distant time and it’s crazy to think that it wasn’t as far back as you may think or it may appear. The states that were mostly famous for slavery were the southern states since they’re decision to keep slavery alive was essentially what would tear the country apart and start a civil war between the North and the South. I can’t imagine being told to wake up at sunrise work all day until dark then get back up the next day with no pay, it should seem crazy to anyone living in our day in age. But back then the African American women, men, and children had no choice but to listen to their masters since they paid good money to have them. I also can’t imagine knowing that that type of lifestyle wouldn’t get any better because of how strongly the South felt about not abolishing slavery. For that reason and because of the fact that there was such strict laws about runaway slaves, I wouldn’t know what I would do with myself. It takes a strong person to forget about all the bad and think about the future and how they’re going to change the situation that they are in and that type of personality is expressed in the select few of many slaves who told their story. There was Fredrick Douglass Harriet Jacobs, Sarah Gudger, William Moore, James Cope, Martin Jackson, Rosa Starke, and Katie Darling. Unfortunately there isn’t enough time or paper for me to talk about all of the slaves and their stories so those are the ones that I’m going to be focusing on.…
cruel, inhumane, and brutal. We have saw in the past the way the white men did the African Americans slaves when they put them in cages, stack them on top of each other, and stuffed them on boats basically leaving the African slaves for dead. Also we seen in the past how the white men took the African family’s split them apart and sold them off to other white men like they were food. In addition to that the white men even raped some of the African women. So, as you can see this is why slavery was never necessary in society because the slave owners could do their own work and also it’s not right to make someone work for less than the work is worth.In addition to the previous paragraph,…