“Every where the years bring to all enough of sin and sorrow; but in slavery the very dawn of life is darkened by these shadows. Even the little child, who is accustomed to wait on her mistress and her children, will learn, before she is twelve years old, why it is that her mistress hates such and such a one among the slaves. Perhaps the child’s own mother is among those hated ones. She listens to violent outbreaks of jealous passion, and cannot help understanding what is the cause. She will become prematurely knowing in evil things. Soon she will learn to tremble when she hears her master’s footfall. She will be compelled to realize that she is no longer a child. If God has bestowed beauty upon her, it will prove her greatest curse. That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave.
I know that some are too much brutalized by slavery to feel the humiliation of their position; but many slaves feel it most acutely, and shrink from the memory of it. I cannot tell how much I suffered in the presence of these wrongs, now how I am still pained by the retrospect. My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him. If I went out for a breath of fresh air, after a day of unwearied toil, his footsteps dogged me. If I knelt by my mother’s grave, his dark shadow fell on me even there. The light heart which nature had given me became heavy with sad forebodings. The other slaves in my master’s house noticed the change. Many of them pitied me; but none dared to ask the cause. They had no need to inquire. They knew too well the guilty practices under that roof; and they were aware that to speak of them was an offence that never went unpunished.”
–Harriet Jacobs, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself
“My mother was sold at Richmond, Virginia, and a gentleman bought her who lived in Georgia, and we did not know that she was sold until she was gone; and the saddest thought was to me to know which way she had gone, and I used to go outside and look up to see if there was anything that would direct me, and I saw a clear place in the sky, and it seemed to me the way she had gone, and I watched it three and a half years, not knowing what that meant, and it was there the whole time that mother was gone from her little ones.”
“My mother was sold at Richmond, Virginia, and a gentleman bought her who lived in Georgia, and we did not know that she was sold until she was gone; and the saddest thought was to me to know which way she had gone, and I used to go outside and look up to see if there was anything that would direct me, and I saw a clear place in the sky, and it seemed to me the way she had gone, and I watched it three and a half years, not knowing what that meant, and it was there the whole time that mother was gone from her little ones.”
“Slavery has existed in this country too long and has stamped its character too deeply and indelibly, to be blotted out in a day or a year, or even in a generation. The slave will yet remain in some sense a slave, long after the chains are taken from his limbs, and the master will yet retain much of the pride, the arrogance, imperiousness and conscious superiority, and love of power, acquired by his former relation of master. Time, necessity, education, will be required to bring all classes into harmonious and natural relations…
Law and the sword can and will, in the end abolish slavery. But law and the sword cannot abolish the malignant slaveholding sentiment which has kept the slave system alive in this country during two centuries. Pride of race, prejudice against color, will raise this hateful clamor for oppression of the negro as heretofore. The slave having ceased to be the abject slave of a single master, his enemies will endeavor to make him the slave of society at large.”
-Frederick Douglass, December 28, 1862, Rochester, New York, Speech at the Spring Street AME Zion Church
Margaret Palm lived in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, along with 190 other free African-Americans, making up about 8% of the town’s population. She rented a white shack on the west end of Emmitsburg Road, and lived there with her husband, Alf Palm and their one child.
During the months leading up to the Battle of Gettysburg, African-American members of the Gettysburg community began fleeing their homes for fear that their freedom and safety would be in jeopardy, once the Confederate army invaded their little town.
There are many stories that surround the persona of “Mag Palm”, as she was called, some perhaps mere legends passed on by other civilians over the years. One legend refers to Mag as “Maggie Bluecoat”, referring to the story that she wore a blue coat of an officer of the War of 1812, and carried a musket while aiding other slaves in their fight for freedom from slavery.
One account, however, of an attempted kidnapping of Mag Palm by two local men is well known and well documented. Many free African-Americans were often victims of kidnapping by their own white neighbors, often to be sold off to Southerners for slavery.
Like the majority of African-American women in the Gettysburg community during the Civil War years, Mag made a hard living by scrubbing floors and washing the clothes of her white neighbors. One cold winter night in 1858, three years before the war even began, upon returning home from picking up her pay from one of her employers, Mag was attacked by two men who tried to tie her hands and take her away. . Mag managed to fight both men off with the help of another neighbor, John Karseen, a store owner in town, who witnessed the attack. Years later Mag Palm was photographed demonstrating how the men bound her hands and documented the attack for history.
During the battle, her home on Emmitsburg Road was occupied by the Union army and eventually destroyed in the fighting on the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg, July 3, 1863. Despite hardships in her own marriage, as her husband drank and was often prone to fits of rage, she managed to buy her own home again along Long Lane, a black community in the town, after the battle was finally over. She continued to struggle financially and was never able to stop beating rugs and scrubbing floors for a living.
Mag Palm passed away in October of 1896 from a heart ailment. She was buried in the Lincoln Cemetery in Gettysburg, among many other African-American civilians of the town. Her courageous story of struggle and survival is only one of the many forgotten African-American civilian stories of the women who lived and survived the battles fought right in their own communities, during the Civil War.
Harriet Beecher Stowe was an author and abolitionist who wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin-Or, Life Among the Lowly”, in 1852. At the time, the book caused a sensation throughout the country, especially in the South. Stowe’s story opened up the country’s eyes to the hideous institution of slavery more than ever.
Stowe, the wife of the staunch abolitionist, Calvin Ellis Stowe, and an abolitionist herself, was once described by President Lincoln upon their meeting as “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is considered the bestselling and most impactful book of the 19th century, and ranks second in Literature only to the Bible.
“This past, the Negro’s past, of rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation: fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worthy of life, since everyone around him denied it; sorrow for his women, for his kinfolk, for his children, who needed his protection, and whom he could not protect; rage, hatred, and murder, hatred for white men so deep that it often turned against him and his own, and made all love, all trust, all joy impossible-this past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful. I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering-enough is certainly as good as a feast-but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.”
This weekend, the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) opened just down the road from us on the National Mall!
Following decades of work to promote and feature the contributions of African Americans, the Act to establish NMAAHC was authorized by Congress in 2003. The museum officially opened September 24, 2016, as the 19th @smithsonian museum. It is the only national museum dedicated entirely to the documentation of African American life, history, and culture.
David Williston’s legacy can be seen through his work as landscape architect, educator, and horticulturalist.
Recognized as the first professionally-trained African American landscape architect, Williston oversaw the development of the Tuskegee Institute campus, where he also taught as professor of horticulture.
The first martyr of the American Revolution wasCrispus Attucks, a sailor of African and Native American heritage who fell in the Boston Massacre. John Hancock honored Attuck’s memory by observing, “Who taught the British soldier that he might be defeated? Who dared look into his eyes? I place, therefore, this Crispus Attucks in the foremost rank of the men that dared.”
Schooled by Youtube: CHARLES HAMILTON HOUSTON THE MAN WHO KILLED JIM CROW
[ In this video we found, we learn more about The Black Then Channel is an all-black history, news and commentary channel. Black Then features the untold stories of african american game changers, icons, and legends. We use videos by today’s best historians, thinkers, creators, commentators, and speakers to educate people about our past. The […]
On September 5, 1942, United States Navy Messman Charles Jackson French swam through the night for 6 - 8 hours pulling a raft of 15 wounded sailors with a rope around his stomach through shark infested waters.
The U.S. Navy Ship the U.S.S. Gregory was hit by Japanese naval fire in the South Pacific. Many were wounded and killed. French successfully brought these men to safety on the shores of The Solomon Islands.
“For meritorious conduct in action while serving on board of a destroyer transport which was badly damaged during the engagement with Japanese forces in the British Solomon Islands on September 5, 1942. After the engagement, a group of about fifteen men were adrift on a raft, which was being deliberately shelled by Japanese naval forces. French tied a line to himself and swam for more than two hours without rest, thus attempting to tow the raft. His conduct was in keeping with the highest traditions of the Naval Service.”
French was memorialized on War gum trading cards and in a comic strip. The Chicago Defender named him Hero of the Year.
Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
(Beloved, 1987)
Toni Morrison (February 18, 1931 - August 5, 2019) - women in history(40/?)
Toni Morrison was an American writer who was known for her examination of Black experience (particularly Black female experience). She won the Nobel prize for literature in 1993.
Toni published her first book, The Bluest Eyes, in 1970 in which she talks about a black girl who is obsessed with white beauty standards. In 1973, her book Sulafollowed.Song of Solomon came out in 1977; in this book, Toni intruduces her first male protagonist and she blends African American folklore and history in a book about the search for identity. Ten years later the critically acclaimed Belovedcame out. In this work, Toni tells a story, based on true events, of a runaway slave who, at the point of recapture, kills her infant daughter in order to spare her a life of slavery. This book won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Toni wrote many other books, in which she talked about many aspects, important to the black community, such as a Black utopian community (Paradise, 1998).
What is always central in the works of Toni Morrison is the Black American experience: her characters struggle to find themselves and their cultural identity in an unjust society.
