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History

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Phil Edwards

Frederick Douglass: Freedom Earned

Sometimes you think you know something pretty well and then you get
surprised. As an American teenager in 60s, I grew up watching the Civil
Rights Movement as it achieved some success for African Americans.
Specializing in History studies in university, teaching high school
students the cruelty of slave ships and plantation life of slaves in the
South, educating myself and others of the struggle for civil rights in
America , and working as an urban specialist in Chicago and Boston
provided some up close and real life experiences with the black
community.

However, my eyes and heart opened to a whole new aspect of the black
experience after reading Frederic Douglass book Narrative Of The Life
Of Frederic Douglass, An American Slave. Frederic Douglass was born
into slavery sometime around 1818. He never knew his father, but
rumor had it that his father was his white master. He, like most slave
children, was separated from his mother before he was one year old. His
mother made a twelve mile night journey only a handful of times before
she died to hold him at night while he slept. Douglass was regularly
lashed and twice so severely that it almost killed him. While in captivity,
he to learned to read and write, which was illegal for a slave.

When he was twenty years of age, he escaped to New Bedford,


Massachusetts where he got work as a calker for ships. After sending for
his Uianc, they married and he became a speaker for the Abolitionist
Movement. The rest is history, as he became a trusted friend and ally to
President Abraham Lincoln in the cause of liberty and freedom.

In his story, Douglass reveals two unholy practices that have affected the
black community throughout its painful American experience. First,
one of the most demonic practices of the slaveholders was to routinely
take babies under one year of age from their mothers and give them to
older female slaves who could no longer work in the Uields. This was
intentionally done to cripple the black families cohesiveness and
prevent them being a loving, caring family unit.

The second profane deed by the white owners had two shameful
aspects that violate any human decency. The slave owner forcefully
takes a female slave for his pleasure. The children that are born to these
women are mulatto and are a constant offense to the slave owners wife.
The wife takes pleasure in punishing the children of this unholy union
but also punishes the mother if she is still within her reach. This what is
referred as insult to injury.

I have only lived in a predominately black community once when my


family and I lived in Kenya, Africa. Mostly, I have lived in white
communities in the United States and Canada. Even before my son
married a wonderful Jamaican woman, I would look into the faces of my
black brothers and sisters and wonder about their personal history.
After reading his story and thinking of their history, at times I want to
cry with open eyes.

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