Note for students that because whites were not enslaved in America, the children of a white mother and enslaved father was automatically free, but in some colonies and later states, legislation punished white women and their mixed-race children by apprenticing the children until adulthood and extending the period of service for the white woman if she was an indentured servant. What were the implications of such punishment? What message did legislatures send about the ideal racial makeup of families?
African American History
On Thinking for One s Self
89 We are most of us second-hand thinkers and second-hand thinkers are not thinkers at all. 89
Booker T. Washington. Up From Slavery: An Autobiography
The poems that Horton composed for students at Chapel Hill were frequently in the form of acrostics. Have your students look up examples of acrostics from Horton&rsquo s time or some other period. An exercise for them might be this: Write an acrostic focused on protesting something in contemporary society. What issues or problems do they find worthy of protest? Who would be the likely audiences for such protests?
Pre-Civil War African-American Slavery - Library of Congress
Naturalization
89 Are we not always trying to adjust ourselves to new relations, to get naturalized into a new family? 89
I find that the most exhilarating and meaningful discussions occur when students have an opportunity to engage with primary sources. Working with documents helps students to develop analytical and investigative skills and can give them a sense of how historians come to their understandings of the past. Interacting directly with documents can also help students to retain information and ideas. I offer a few primary sources here that should stimulate discussion and help students to imagine what life may have been like in the past.
69 Nikki Giovanni , Black Feeling Black Talk Black Judgement (New York: Morrow, 6975), p. 59. Madhubuti, &ldquo Assassination,&rdquo in Call and Response , pp. 6598-99.
Now turn to some African American poetry to make further distinctions. Ask students to read Phillis Wheatley&rsquo s &ldquo On Being Brought from Africa to America ,&rdquo Langston Hughes&rsquo s &ldquo Mother to Son ,&rdquo and Rita Dove&rsquo s &ldquo Parsley.&rdquo Have students identify what it is that each poet hopes to achieve in his/her poem. Earlier, I labeled Wheatley&rsquo s and Dove&rsquo s poems as protest, but they are distinctly different. Have students account for those differences. Can &ldquo Mother to Son&rdquo be considered a protest poem? If so, what makes it so? If not, what makes a designation of protest poetry inappropriate? What are the strategies that each poet uses to effect his/her objective?
The videos and features above are from PBS documentaries and productions by Secrets of the Dead , Slavery and the Making of America , The Underground Railroad: The William Still Story , History Detectives , American Experience , UNC-TV and KLRU.
In some ways enslaved African American families very much resembled other families who lived in other times and places and under vastly different circumstances. Some husbands and wives loved each other some did not get along. Children sometimes abided by parent&rsquo s rules other times they followed their own minds. Most parents loved their children and wanted to protect them. In some critical ways, though, the slavery that marked everything about their lives made these families very different. Belonging to another human being brought unique constrictions, disruptions, frustrations, and pain.
It is important to remember, however, that not all slaves worked on large cotton plantations. African American slaves also worked in many other types of agriculture, including tobacco, hemp (for rope-making), corn, and livestock. Many slaves also worked in Southern cities, working at a variety of skilled trades as well as common laborers. It was not unusual for slaves working in the cities to put away enough money to buy their freedom. Indeed, Southern cities, as well as many in the North, had large so-called free black populations.
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