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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsMaybe Ben Carson needs to read this
Frederick Douglass On How Slave Owners Used Food As A Weapon Of ControlPresident Trump recently described Frederick Douglass as "an example of somebody who's done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice." The president's muddled tense it came out sounding as if the 19th-century abolitionist were alive with a galloping Twitter following provoked some mirth on social media. But the spotlight on one of America's great moral heroes is a welcome one.
Douglass was born on a plantation in Eastern Maryland in 1817 or 1818 he did not know his birthday, much less have a long-form birth certificate to a black mother (from whom he was separated as a boy) and a white father (whom he never knew and who was likely the "master" of the house). He was parceled out to serve different members of the family. His childhood was marked by hunger and cold, and his teen years passed in one long stretch of hard labor, coma-like fatigue, routine floggings, hunger, and other commonplace tortures from the slavery handbook.
At 20, he ran away to New York and started his new life as an anti-slavery orator and activist. Acutely conscious of being a literary witness to the inhumane institution he had escaped, he made sure to document his life in not one but three autobiographies. His memoirs bring alive the immoral mechanics of slavery and its weapons of control. Chief among them: food.
Hunger was the young Fred's faithful boyhood companion. "I have often been so pinched with hunger, that I have fought with the dog 'Old Nep' for the smallest crumbs that fell from the kitchen table, and have been glad when I won a single crumb in the combat," he wrote in My Bondage and My Freedom. "Many times have I followed, with eager step, the waiting-girl when she went out to shake the table cloth, to get the crumbs and small bones flung out for the cats."
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/02/10/514385071/frederick-douglass-on-how-slave-owners-used-food-as-a-weapon-of-control
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Maybe Ben Carson needs to read this (Original Post)
Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin
Mar 2017
OP
2naSalit
(86,308 posts)1. Amen to that! K&R.
trusty elf
(7,380 posts)2. ....
[img][/img]
MFM008
(19,803 posts)3. He's to busy
Sweeping the grain out of the great pyramid.......
pansypoo53219
(20,952 posts)4. has ben been to the african american museum?