He valued freedom very much and made the point if there is no struggle than there is no progress. Douglass’s element of freedom was by educating the people in displaying the horrors of slavery and the harsh treatments. He made it his mission to exhibit how white slaveholders extend slavery by keeping their slaves oblivious. During the time when Douglass was writing, a lot of people really believed that slavery was something that was normal. They had the belief that blacks were integrally powerless of contributing in civil society and therefore would need to be kept as workers for whites.
Woodson also stressed that society did not make a valid effort in trying to domesticate the African-American after the oppression of slavery ended. Instead of having shackles around their wrists and ankles, African-Americans now had to deal with an industrialized world which purposely got a head start and left them behind. However, it was also stated by Woodson that African-Americans should forgive but never forget how they were placed in such an economical, physical, emotional, and social deficit, but use it as a tool of hope and determination for the
Adam and Eve, whom it was believed that all of humanity descended from, were thought to be light-skinned by Europeans. Therefore these black-skinned people were thought to be “not part of the common creation ” and possibly “not human”. The English also believed in very real negative connotations associated with the color black. They believed that it “epitomized evil and sin” so therefore, those with black skin must embody those faults. They also linked Africans with Ham, Noah’s son who sinned against him, causing Noah to curse Ham’s son Canaan, as well as his descendants to forever be “a servant of servants”.
We are taught to blame slavery on the Southern states but we learned that the Northern states were just as responsible due to their lack of action, fear of the results due to abolishment, and most importantly their double standard on the stance of slavery. Professor Nash gives us and insightful view from the eyes of free blacks and their contribution in the fight for freedom and equality of African Americans. This book has given me an insight of our history of slavery that I was unaware of, people involved and events that took place. The struggle for equality that we have in our country now is evident that it stem from our past. Using these events we can understand ourselves and continue to build a stable and free America which our forefathers based their fight for liberty and freedom from England and strengthen the words written within our Constitution that establish freedom and equality for “ALL
Black History: Lost, stolen, or strayed Throughout our lives we have been taught, shown, and reassured of the very existence of slavery. What we are not taught is that we existed before slavery and our history, as Africans, begins long before the invasion of Europe, and even before the invasion of Rhome. Within most educational institutions, at whatever level, we have been depicted as the weak minded people vulnerable to capture and responsive to torture. Could it be that before being invaded we were peaceful people and worried more about living off of the land and life, which was given to us by God, than the creation of weapons used to conquer? Could it be that the Roman Europeans were only empowered enough to defeat us by being able to coerce our northern equals with riches and foreign goods to accept them as allies and aid them in their sinister plans?
Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner himself, also defended the abolition of slavery when he commented, “ I congratulate you, fellow citizens...to withdraw...the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa, and which the morality, the reputation, and the best interests of our country, have long been eager to proscribe.” (Jefferson) This demonstrates that the vast majority of the population was very content with this new decision, although the plantation owners from the South were left with nothing. Slavery was the basis of their success, and after the Emancipation Proclamation they had no money and no man labour to raise their crops. The slaves had only one thing in their mind at the moment, that they were free and there was nobody telling them what to do or not do. But after time, they began to question themselves, what will we do
This Black thought revolutionary response to Eurocentric attitudes of African and Black people. Stereotypes have been designed to reshape African history and its impact on civilization, tracing back to the Greek. These stereotypes have distorted and made African history very vague, giving a sense of entitlement to others. Scholars have used this as a tool to deny African contribution to modern civilization, omitting the fact that all human civilization has been impacted by Africa from millions of years ago. This gave a sense of entitlement to Europeans claiming there to be no African impact on Greece civilization.
As James Weldon Johnson accounts in his chronicle, “Dairy of an Ex Colored Man” Johnson describes acts of hate and violence toward African Americans. Many thought Blacks inferior and urged they could not and will never become civilized; “you freed nigger and you gave him a ballot, but you couldn’t make a citizen out of him.”(75) Johnson lived first hand in a society Griffith wished to enforce and even proliferate. His testimony shows that what Griffith believed was the solution to a “black problem” was already in practice. But more than that, Johnson knew that this was not an issue of Black vs. White in the protection of a righteous civilization. He argued that “modern civilization hit ignorance of the masses through the means of popular education.
The Europeans must had felt some type of superior to the Africans because why else would you want to dehumanize a person. The conditions that Africans slaves had to be in were unthinkable.
At best, these populations were considered human but to a lesser degree than Western populations, and therefore deserving of colonization and enslavement. At the worst, these populations were thought of more as animals than humans, incapable of being a part of civilized society, and only good for labor benefitting whites. The idea of a slave revolt orchestrated by the slaves themselves was, therefore, impossible to imagine. Even more unimaginable was the radicalism of the Haitian Revolution. The events of August 1791 were a clear statement by the slave population about the institution of slavery on Saint Domingue, and were unprecedented in the world at the time.