What do the WPA interviewees emphasize in the mid s? How is the difference of forty years reflected in the tone and emphasis that Hughes and the WPA interviewees bring to their narratives? How are their narratives influenced by genre—first-person narrative or transcribed interview? What do you learn from the photographs? When are the enslaved people aware of the camera?
How do you interpret their postures and expressions? Why are some of the photographs stereographs? What led to your specific selection of photograph and narrator? How did enslaved African Americans construct communities over time? What were their principal characteristics? Printing Louis Hughes narrative:.
What lessons had he already learned about power as it related to him, an enslaved child? Why did he make decision that he ultimately did? This incident illuminates tensions in the roles that enslaved people had to play in their lives. He appealed to his son to recognize that their relationship made the father as important, and possibly as powerful, as their owner. Ask student to explore these tensions.
What do his words tell us about his feelings? What claims was he making despite his status as a slave. Did he put his son at risk by demanding obedience? Note for the students that although many enslaved children grew up apart from their fathers, some had fathers in their homes. This is one example. How do students imagine that other enslaved parents might have handled similar dilemmas regarding obedience and loyalty? Running away to find family members. This ad is from the New Orleans Picayune , April 11, This advertisement for a teenaged boy who ran away is compelling on many levels.
Encourage students to do a close reading and analysis of the ad. How do they suppose Isaac Pipkin knew what clothing Jacob had on when he left? Is it likely that an enslaved boy owned a black bearskin coat?
What about the pistols? Who did those likely belong to? Jacob was quite a distance away from his sister—how do students imagine Jacob knew where she was? Information Wanted Ads. This advertisement was placed in the Colored Tennessean newspaper in Nashville, Tennessee on October 7, Encourage students to brainstorm about every detail that Thornton Copeland squeezed into this ad of six lines.
Some topics you might explore include the following. Why did he identify his former owner? How long had mother and son been apart? What do students make of the fact that he was searching for his mother after all those years? We do not know if Thornton Copeland or the other thousands of people who searched for family members ever found them.
It may be interesting to have students think about what would happen if people did find each other. What sorts of adjustments might they have had to make? What if a husband or wife had remarried?
What if children no longer recognized their parents? The most significant debate regarding the history of African American families was sparked not by an historian, but by sociologist and policy maker, subsequently Senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan Drawing on the work of sociologist E.
In short, because emotions are part of the big picture. How did they talk to one another about slavery, resistance, and revolution? How did they sort through which of their fellows they could trust and which they could not? Brown was sold to a planter named Thomas Stevens in Baldwin County, Georgia, and forced to work as a member of a field gang in the corn fields.
Brown professed that, in the face of such depravation, he wanted to die. He was saved, however, by a fellow member of his field gang, John Glasgow. Glasgow empathized with Brown, consoling him by regularly speaking of his own personal story.
Glasgow had been a free black sailor based in England with a wife and two children. After having journeyed to Savannah, Georgia, for a cargo of rice, he was abducted and sold into slavery. This detail indicates that the two friends most likely spent many hours exchanging stories and consoling one another.
They sustained their friendship through these conversations. Sharing their traumatic experiences in this way, the pair sought relief from the dehumanizing features of enslaved life. Brown was saved by the friendship he shared with Glasgow. Glasgow comforted and nursed Brown through his traumatic experiences; crucially, he gave Brown hope — a reason to live. The story of Brown and Glasgow shows how friendship provided men with a buffer against the brutal features of enslaved life.
Furthermore, we see how friendship could, in some cases, ultimately prove subversive, directly challenging the system of slavery. In the trusted sanctuary of their friendship, Glasgow told deeply personal stories relating to his past and encouraged him to seek freedom. John Brown, initially a traumatized, depressed, and broken slave, is transformed into an inspired, hopeful, and defiant man who sought his liberty, and eventually claims it, resulting from his friendship with John Glasgow.
In the private space of their friendship, these two men formulated their politics. White folks you can have your automobiles, paved streets and lights.
You can have your buses, and street cars, and hot pavement and tall buildings cause I aint got no use for em no way. I tell you what I do want--I want my old cotton bed and the moonlight shining through the willow trees, and the cool grass under my feet while I run around catching lightening bugs.
I want to feel the sway of the old wagon, going down the red, dusty road, and listening to the wheels groaning as they roll along. I want to sink my teeth into that old ash cake. White folks, I want to see the boats passing up and down the Alabammy river and hear the slaves singing at their work.
I want to see dawn break over the black ridge and the twilight settle over the place spreading an orange hue. I want to walk the paths through the woods and see the rabbits and the birds and the frogs at night But they took me away from that a long time ago.
Weren't long before I married and had children, but don't none of em contribute to my support now. One of them was killed in the big war with German, and the rest is all scattered out--eight of em.
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