The Myrtles Plantation : A Site Of Dehumanization

John. W. Blessingame, The Slave Community: The Plantation Life in The Antebellum South (Oxford University Press, Inc: 1972, 1979).

Chapter five in Takaki’s “A Different Mirror” focused primary on the African-American experience 1700s through the end of the Civil War and the failure of Reconstruction. The experience of reading these chapters after learning about the continued degradation of Native Americans lent itself to continued feelings of hopelessness regarding the beginnings of U.S. history. For a moment, I felt deep shame at the actions of the founders of the United States, especially those who were the head of the country, in that time President Andrew Jackson. Slavery was not only a "peculiar institution" but also one that forced landowners to dismiss that they were exploiting fellow human beings for profit. Takaki discussed four major figures before, during, and

Based on historical events, Charles Chestnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, gives human details to produce a vivid picture of life in the south after the failure of reconstruction. His work has many underlying themes among which are the use of the press to stir already volatile emotions through propaganda, class structure not only along color lines but within races, and the effects of the white supremacists’ agenda on the integrity of those who claimed to be morally advanced. Through this story, Chesnutt allows the reader to enter the minds of the characters to show how change will not take place until both whites and blacks detach themselves from traditions that seem to be engraved on their

First, ask yourself how would you feel after hearing the news that one of your family members had been lynched? Throughout the chapters 1-8, we can experience and observe the disheartening history of violence and lies. It is additionally an irritating depiction of a partitioned country on the very edge of the social equality development and an eerie contemplation on race, history, and the battle for truth. Throughout history, the conditions of the lynching, how it affected the legislators of the day, quickened the social equality development and keeps on shadowing the Georgia people group where these homicides occurred. During the 1900s until 19600s various African-Americans experienced various harsh conditions of violence, never being granted the right to vote and being segregated from whites based on their race and skin-color from their white masters. In general racism between whites and blacks can be seen throughout the globe during the era of slavery

Wexler’s attention to these details ensures that the lynching victims are more than flat “symbols,” constructed by a foreign and long past semiotic system, to the reader. She writes, for instance, of George Murray, or Dorsey, who had “returned [to Monroe] from the army” (167), after “four and one-half years” of service, in September 1945, that he was a man who had “love for music,” “skill as a farmer,” and a memorable smile (99). In this respect, Wexler accomplishes the same empathy for an innocent victim as the NAACP, in 1946, might have done, and in similar style—as she contends, in parallel fashion to the deceased victims’

In Trethewey’s “Native Guard,” graves symbolize of the futility of mankind’s efforts to conceal its evils, and of failure to combat the racist system put in place by white America. For years, Trethewey’s mother fought to protect her daughter from the hatred and prejudice in America. Her protest against the hatred of America was snuffed out by abusive partners and the nascent racism of America. In the poem “Graveyard Blues,”she describes the atmosphere of the graveyard as blues-y and dreary. She “wander[s] now among names of the dead: My mother’s name, stone pillow for my head,” her mother’s name now only a marker of her lifetime of suffering. Not only a problem in Trethewey’s time, racism and inherent discrimination was an issue for even the African American heroes of the Civil War, the Native Guard receive no recognition from the historians of the fort or the Daughters of the Confederacy. In the poem “Elegy for the Native Guards, Trethewey states that there are “no names carved for the Native Guards— 2nd Regiment, Union men, black phalanx. What is monument to their legacy?” They receive no honorable grave. They receive the most barbaric of burial rites, doomed to have “fish dart among their bones.” The bodies of the native guard are cast out of sight into the ocean, neglected in an attempt to forget the evils committed against them. Their forgotten and neglected grave symbolizes the futility of fighting against the racism of America, as well as the futility in concealing

For many people, the idea of a slave culture or of slaves exercising control and autonomy within the context of the master-slave relationship seems impossible. After all, the entire concept of the system of slavery is based upon the ownership of another person, which implies total control. However, Drew Gilpin Faust's essay, "Culture, Conflict, and Community on the Antebellum Plantation," which is based upon meticulous records kept by slave-owner James Henry Hammond, reveal that the master-slave relationship was far more complex than one might believe. Even when faced with rigid systems of control, slaves exercised some autonomy. Even with a rigid master, such as Hammond, these efforts at self-control frequently modified behavior on the plantation. In fact, while it is almost certain that some masters ruled through tyranny alone, it appears that the back-and-forth nature of the master-slave relationship meant that masters had to provide some inducements to produce work from their slaves.

In the book titled The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, author John Blassingame’s theme, focused on the history of African slave experience throughout the American South. After much research, the author said in the preface that most historians focused more on the planter instead of the slave. He also pointed out that most of the research on slaves by previous historians was based on stereotypes, and do not tell the real history of slave life and a slave’s inner self. Most of these historians, who focused on antebellum southern history, left out the African-American slave experience on purpose. Through much gathering of research, Blassingame hoped to correct this injustice to the history of African-American slaves, and show how slavery affected slaves, but also American life, culture, and thought.

The killings made by the slaves are saddening, too. Mutilating the whites and leaving their bodies lying is inhumane. It is such a shocking story. This book was meant to teach the reader on the inhumanity of slavery. It also gives us the image of what happened during the past years when slavery was practised.

The description of this book is captivating with details of conflicts in the exclusive community of Savannah that include murder and drama. There are many aspects of this book that keep the reader interested, which makes it hard to read without being enveloped in the mysteries that occur. Description can be seen when the narrator describes the main character of the book, Jim Williams and writes, “He was tall, about fifty, with darkly handsome, almost sinister features: a neatly trimmed

Race is a manmade social construction, first used to justify slavery in the early Colonial period. The articles discussed in this paper examines different elements of race and of slavery. The articles present two completely different opinions on the treatment and ideals associated with race and slavery before the civil war. While the articles are on completely different sides of spectrum associated with slavery, they are both discussing race.

My paper is an attempt to analyze the entire era of slavery and its later effects upon the lives of Africans who were brought forcefully to America as slaves and even after its abolition were treated inhumanly. My major attempt is to get an in depth insight of the struggles of these people for their survival in such an environment and the predicament of black women who were doubly oppressed; were the victims of both the whites and black men; and treated as naked savages and beasts, with Alice Walker’ masterpiece and Pulitzer prize winning The Color Purple. I have taken this project with my keen interest because the novel touched me deeply and I wanted to analyze it thoroughly.

Slavery is a contradictory subject in American history because “one hears…of the staid and gentle patriarchy, the wide and sleepy plantations with lord and retainers, ease and happiness; [while] on the other hand on hears of barbarous cruelty and unbridles power and wide oppression of men” (Dubois 2). Dubois’s The Negro in the United States is an autoethnographic text which is a representation “that the so-defined others

Hughes’s descriptive writing prompts the reader to visualize strong images of oppression in America. The speaker provides an image of an extremely suppressed group of people in the statement: “I am the red man driven from the land” (Hughes 21). This simple phrase creates a picture of the Native Americans being driven from their lands and forced to live on undesirable land, and, as a result, this invites the reader to acknowledge their severe oppression. Similarly, the speaker mentions the people who were “torn from Black Africa’s strand” (Hughes 50). This generates an image of boats packed with a depressing amount of broken people, waiting to be sold into slavery. These visual examples portray the severity of the situation that many Americans found themselves in. These

In this text, readers are able to use New Historicism to connect the racism occurring during the era when the book was written, to the text to gain a deeper understanding. In this example, Vera Claythorne is one of ten guests occupying the mansion on Soldier's Island. Once in her room she begins examining an old nursery rhyme that is framed in her room: