While reading the source about education I found it very hard to believe that someone could tell a child that they dont believe you are intelligent and should not be allowed to go to school. However, this did not stop anyone from telling this to the black children. Education is always a very important factor in a childs life. However, for slaves, education was not a very highly goal they could be obtained easily. White people felt that slaves should not be educated and should not have the same educational opportunites as the white children. This is when we start to see the idea of different schools for the black and white children. The african american children were not looked upon as being educated, a high school degree was not likely and you would never see them going to college. This was just something that black kids knew they would not be doing in their life time. The whole idea of slavery is at times hard to grasp because living in the present its difficult to think that this could have ever happened at one time. Hopefully America can learn from the past and realize that slavery was never a thing to be proud of and now today education is offered to anyone willing to take it no matter the color of your skin.

Poems on slavery really allow people to truly understand how the times of being a slave were. While reading these poems I tried to put myself in their situation and try to understand how it would feel to have been living during a time having no rights at all and being treated like you were not even a person. Poems to me allow for people to really get the emotional side of a story from someone. When you are told a story with a lot of emotion, this is when you can put yourself in their shoes and try to see from their point of view. The poems on slavery shows a lot of emotion with what happened to them. One example from the poems is "A Slaves Dream", this poem is talking about a slave who is having a dream, in this dream he is running away and being able to escape from his owner and have the life he has always wanted. The descriptive words really put readers into the story and you start to see and feel what it was like for a slave to run away and the fear they had. We can tell that he is running through the trees and that he is bare foot beacuase it talks about every step he is hitting things on the ground. Later on in the poem we started understanding that the slave does not feel the beating of the whip of his master because it is a dream. I interputed this part of the poem that really he is being whipped so badly that his owner is killing him and that is why he thinks he does not feel it, at the end of the poem I get the feeling the slave does end up passing away.

"Tisn't he who has stood and looked on, that can tell you what slavery is--'tis he who has endured." No one really knows about a situation until they have lived it for themselves. Hearing stories or reading about the hardships that these people had to go through does not compare to actually having to go through it. I feel that the one way researchers have been able to get first hand accounts on what slave life was really like was being able to get narratives of ex slaves and hear their stories about life as a slave. The picture that I have found through the Library of Congress website is a women slave named Aunt Winnie, who was one of the ex slaves that talked about her first hand accounts on being a slave. Aunt Winnie is just one of the nearly two thousand interviews with former slaves conducted during the Great Depression through the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP). This project was one of the first times that slaves were being talked to one on one about their memories from being a slave in America. Another reason i feel that these first hand slave accounts are so important to American history is that these people are being able to open up and allow themselves to be in a vulnerable stage just to be able to tell their stories to the world. These accounts are taking more serious too because everything these people are saying are true facts and true events that happened to them. I feel more people should be educated on these narratives because it would really open up peoples eyes to life as a slave.

Am I not a man and a brother? Picture

The discrption of the picture is a large, bold woodcut image of a supplicant male slave in chains appears on the 1837 broadside publication of John Greenleaf Whittier's antislavery poem, "Our Countrymen in Chains."

What, ho !—our countrymen in chains !—
The whip on WOMAN'S shrinking flesh !
Our soil yet reddening with the stains,
Caught from her scourging, warm and fresh !
What ! mothers from their children riven !—
What ! God's own image bought and sold !—
AMERICANS to market driven,

And bartered as the brute for gold !
Speak !—shall their agony of prayer
Come thrilling to our hearts in vain !
To us—whose fathers scorned to bear
The paltry menace of a chain ;—
To us whose boast is loud and long
Of holy liberty and light—
Say, shall these writhing slaves of Wrong
Plead vainly for their plundered Right ?


The poem and the picture each I feel have the same meaning of trying to explain slavery in their own ways. The poem goes into detail talking about the beating that slaves would recieve and also about how the only think America sees in them is a profit and something to trade.These two statements are very ture. Slaves just became part of a big slave trade that the only goal was to make the most money and to get the most slaves, they were looked as profit not anything else besides that.  America at the time was not thinking that these slaves were people but instead they looked at slaves as a way to make a living. The title of the picture tells a story in itself, "Am I not a man and a brother?" this title to me is saying that slaves were neither treated like a man or a brother. They just became property to their owner. After looking back on pictures and poems that had true meaning about how the slave world was, America needs to know that the life of a slave was nothing but hard and just trying to stay alive.

In the book American slavery and colour by William Chambers goes into great detail about the idea and politics of slavery. During the time of slavery white men thought slavery was not wrong and that slavery was needed at the time. The south believed slavery was "right, natural, and necessary." William Chambers brings up the point that all great nations before had some kind of slavery at one point in time. This is one example of how the south tried to make slavery a moral thing. They believed slavery was supposed to happen and needed to happen for America to become a greater and stronger nation. Thinking that if they had people to handle the things around the house and just to have extra hands whatever the owners did would in the end benefit America. However, today we know this is not true. My point of view on slavery is that by America having slavery made us a weaker nation as a whole. The white men did not feel like they had enough power and control until they had someone to control which in return became the slaves. Whenever someone picks on another person this is just showing that they are weak and not sure of themselves. So for America to now look back upon slavery I feel shows that America was a weak nation for having slavery, and the only people that showed strength were the slaves for having to deal with their rights being taken from them and treated like they were nothing to no one.