Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
african american women during the civil rights movement
examine ancient and modern slavery
examine ancient and modern slavery
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Anna Kingsley, a woman of strength and determination overcame many odds not expected of an African American slave. She married a slave owner, owned land, and was once a slave herself. She was well known in a free black community she helped establish.
Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley was the wife of plantation owner Zephaniah Kingsley. She was the daughter of a man of high status. Her father’s sides were descendants of the well know Njaajan Njaay, the creators of the Jolof Empire. Her father was killed in April 1806, the day she was captured. The tyeddo warriors invaded her village and collected all the villagers to be sold as slaves. That day she not only lost her freedom and her home, but also her dignity and her youth (Harvey, 41).
Anna and the others were lead to a ship and they sailed from Senegal to Havana, Cuba to be sold as slaves. The Havana Market was the center of commerce of Spain’s colonies in America (Schafer, 23). Anna arrived in Florida in 1806. She was thirteen years old. Zephaniah Kinglsey Jr was a citizen of Spanish East Florida. He was born in England, but raised in Charleston, South Carolina. His father, a merchant, moved his family to Nova Scotia because he was banished from South Carolina for giving support to King George III at time of the American Revolution.
In 1808, Kinglsey moved to Florida, where he pledged his fidelity to Spain and imported slaves on his plantation (Schafer, 21). Once purchased, Kingsley boarded Anna on the ship Esther and they sailed to Laurel Grove Plantation north and on the west of the St. Johns River. This would be her new home. She did not stay in the slave quarters, but she did stay in his two-story home. He thought of her as his wife and she was carrying his child. A few months before Anna gave birth; she became manager of Kingsley’s household located at Laurel Grove. Most of the slave’s came from East and West Africa. The plantation consisted of corn, cotton, mandarin oranges, sugarcane, potatoes and beans. According to Kinglsey “color ought not be the badge of degrading,” only the distinction should be between slaves and free, not between white and colored (Schafer, 32).
Anna and Zephaniah were open about their relationship. She was the head wife or woman in a polygamous household. One March 4, 1811 after five years of enslavement, Anna was emancipated by her husband. She was now a free woman again. In 181...
... middle of paper ...
...she once again had to leave the home she created because Florida seceded the union. The Civil War soon followed. After the Civil War, Anna never had the wealth and power that she once had. Her personal wealth was acquired through ownership of her slaves. There is no true documentation as to when Anna died, but it is thought to be between 1860 and 1870. Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley was buried in a peaceful grove off the St. Johns River in Florida. She is surrounded by many family members including her daughters.
She rests peacefully in an unmarked grave sheltered from the violence that followed her through a life marked by danger, courage, tenacious defense of family, flight, and triumphant return (Schafer, 121). She was a remarkable and determined black woman who achieved many accomplishments that are extraordinary. She became a well known figure in a free black community.
Works Cited
Harvey, Karen. Daring daughters: St. Augustine’s feisty females. Virginia Beach, VA, 2002
Schafer, Daniel. Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley. Florida, 2003
Tilford, Kathy, Anna Kingsley: A free woman.” OAH Magazine of history 12, 1997
http://www.oah.org/pubs/magazone/women/tilford.htm
Hammond’s voice was very loud when it came to the issue of slavery. He was not ashamed to let everyone know how much he supported it. In 1831, Hammond became the owner of a cotton plantation called Silver Bluff. There were 147 slaves at Silver Bluff when Hammond arrived to take possession of it. They were eager to meet their new master. “Hammond had acquired seventy-four females and seventy-three males, a population with a median age of twenty-five. He would certainly have noted that forty-six, nearly a third of these slaves, were not yet fifteen, too young to be much use in the fields but a good foundation for a vigorous future labor force. Undoubtedly, too, he observed that sixty-four of the slaves were between fifteen and forty-five, the prime work years. These were the individuals upon whom Hammond would rely to plant, cultivate, and harvest the cotton and corn that would generate most of his yearly income” (Faust, 71). The rest were older slaves that couldn’t really do a lot of hard labor in the field, but they could do chores that didn’t require such demanding work ethics like watching over the children whose parents are out working in the fields.
“Fences” is a play written by August Wilson about a family living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1957. Troy and Rose have been married for 18 years and have two grown children; Lyons and Corey. Troy is an uptight, prideful man who always claims that he does not fear death, the rest of his family is more laxed and more content with their lives than Troy is. As the play progresses the audience learns more about Troy’s checkered past with sharecropping, his lack of education and the time he spent in prison. The audience also learns more about Troy’s love for baseball and the dreams he lost due to racism and segregation. In the middle of the play the author outwardly confirms what the audience has been suspecting; Troy isn’t exactly satisfied with his life. He feels that he does not get to enjoy his life and that his family is nothing more than a responsibility. Getting caught up in this feelings, Troy cheats on Rose with a woman named Alberta and fathers a child with the mistress. By the end of the play Troy loses both of the women and in 1965, finally gets the meeting with death that he had been calling for throughout the play. Over the
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl. 2nd Edition. Edited by Pine T. Joslyn. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, INC., 2001.
Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Olaudah Equiano all have extremely interesting slave narratives. During their lives, they faced plenty of racist discrimination and troubling moments. They were all forced into slavery at an awfully young age and they all had to fight for their freedom. In 1797, Truth was born into slavery in New York with the name of Isabella Van Wagener. She was a slave for most of her life and eventually got emancipated. Truth was an immense women’s suffrage activist. She went on to preach about her religious life, become apart of the abolitionist movement, and give public speeches. Truth wrote a well-known personal experience called An Account of an Experience with Discrimination, and she gave a few famous speech called Ain’t I a Woman? and Speech at New York City Convention. In 1818, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born into slavery in Tuckahoe, Maryland. When he was older, he made an escape plan by disguising himself as a sailor and going on a train to New York. When he became a free man, he changed his name to Frederick Douglass and married Anna Murray. He went on to give many speeches and he became apart of the Anti-Slavery Society. Douglass wrote his story From My Bondage and My Freedom and became a publisher for a newspaper. In 1745, Olaudah Equiano was born in Essaka, Nigeria. Equiano and his sister were both kidnapped and put on the middle passage from Africa to Barbados and then finally to Virginia. He eventually saved enough money to buy his freedom and got married to Susanna Cullen. Equiano wrote his story down and named it From the Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. He spent the rest of his life promoting the abolition movement. Throughout the personal slave narra...
Valerie Martin’s Novel Property is an engrossing story of the wife of a slave owner and a slave, whom a mistress of the slave owner, during the late 18th century in New Orleans. Martin guides you through both, Manon Guadet and her servant Sarah’s lives, as Ms. Gaudet unhappily lives married on a plantation and Sarah unhappily lives on the plantation. Ms. Gaudet’s misserableness is derived from the misfortune of being married to a man that she despises and does not love. Sarah, the slave, is solely unhappy due to the fact that she is a slave, and has unwillingly conceived to children by Ms. Gaudiest husband, which rightfully makes Sarah a mistress. Throughout the book, Martin captivates the reader and enables you to place yourself in the characters shoes and it is almost as you can relate to how the characters are feeling.
Forty-two states have adopted Common Core State Standards. These standards were created to focus only on English and Mathematics. In effect of states adopting Common Core Standards, all other subjects taught in school seemed less important. History and Science standards are no longer stressed. Students are limited to being proficient in only two subjects. The Common Core deprives students’ ability to be skilled in multiple areas. These standards do not provide a slight “break” from the challenging fast past teaching of English and Mathematics. In addition to limiting education to English and Mathematics, Jill Bowden explains that the Common Core is affecting kindergarteners by taking “away from materials that encourage playful learning.” (36).
Douglass’s slave owner, The Colonel owned around 3-4 hundred slaves on his plantation where they grew tobacco, corn and w...
In her sixties, she came back to the South. In the South prison, she talked with some black people about what happened over there. She also gave them courage to be free and alive, before she came back to Chicago. In her last life, she wrote the autobiography so the young people knew what happen to their grandparents and parents during the reconstruction
Douglass gave many important details on how slaves were treated in the early United States. He gives in depth insight on the brutality of how a master treated slaves, “for a slave with knowledge.” Douglass explains in his autobiography how he was unaware of his position as a slave when he was a child but learned quickly from experience around the plantation he was reared. He wrote about how he didn’t know much about his mother, masters thought it was ideal to remove the mother from the child as soon as a year of the child being born in order to remove any attachment from each other in order for them to serve as better slaves. He also illustrates how he and other slaves living conditions with a monthly allowance of eight pounds of pork or its equivalent in fish as well as one bushel of corn meal. For the adults where given basically one outfit that would serve its purpose for one year, if not they would go without for the rest of the year. As for the children they were given only two coarse lien shirts and if not they would be naked for all that year as well. Douglas described that he and the other slaves all had something in common the hard dirt floor on which they al...
A fugitive slave who was taught to read by his slave mistress, and who as an ex-slave, became the most famous and articulate rebuke to the monstrous institution of slavery ever to speak or to write in America.
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York: Penguin Group, 2000. Print.
Slave Rebellions were becoming common and one of the most famous was Nat Turner’s Rebellion. Led by slave preacher Nat Turner, who “became convinced that he had been chosen by God to lead his people to freedom”, a group of almost 80 slaves murdered over 60 white men, women, and children (Slave Rebellions). Maria Stewart was the first black women reported to have delivered a public speech (Coddon). She wrote a manuscript to a black audience that encouraged them not to “kill, burn, or destroy”, but rather “improve your talents… show forth your powers of mind (Coddon).” She wanted black people to know that both God and our founding documents affirmed them as equal with other men (Coddon). Being a black woman herself, she addressed other black women stating “ O, ye daughters of Africa, awake! Awake! Arise! No longer sleep nor slumber, but distinguish yourselves. Show forth the world that ye are endowed with noble and exalted faculties (Coddon).” Stewart believed that the world wasn 't going to change for the blacks, that the blacks had to change for the world, but by changes she meant show the world their worthiness and fight for their equality. Another woman fighting for equality was Sojourner Truth. Truth, formerly known as Isabella and former slave, was singer and public speaker against slavery (Coddon). SHe was the only black delegate at the Worcester, Massachusetts women’s rights convention in 1850 (Coddon).
...nspired to make a change that she knew that nothing could stop her, not even her family. In a way, she seemed to want to prove that she could rise above the rest. She refused to let fear eat at her and inflict in her the weakness that poisoned her family. As a child she was a witness to too much violence and pain and much too often she could feel the hopelessness that many African Americans felt. She was set in her beliefs to make choices freely and help others like herself do so as well.
The entirety of the Nadel’s article sheds light on a topic that is not easy for many authors to use without creating caricatures or exaggerated images of a stereotype. At first reading, the content is a little confusing, and somewhat daunting. However, after another reading, the text is easier to grasp. Nadel’s article would have been much stronger if he took time to mention other characters than Troy. Adding more about the character of Rose in this article created a fuller and better grasp on the topic of the fence, which Nadel...
The theme of August Wilson’s play “Fences” is the coming of age in the life of a broken black man. Wilson wrote about the black experience in different decades and the struggle that many blacks faced, and that is seen in “Fences” because there are two different generations portrayed in Troy and Cory. Troy plays the part of the protagonist who has been disillusioned throughout his life by everyone he has been close to. He was forced to leave home at an early age because his father beat him so dramatically. Troy never learned how to treat people close to him and he never gave any one a chance to prove themselves because he was selfish. This makes Troy the antagonist in the story because he is not only hitting up against everyone in the play, but he is also hitting up against himself and ultimately making his life more complicated. The discrimination that Troy faced while playing baseball and the torment he endures as a child shape him into one of the most dynamic characters in literary history.The central conflict is the relationship between Troy and Cory. The two of them have conflicting views about Cory’s future and, as the play goes on, this rocky relationship crumbles because Troy will not let Cory play collegiate football. The relationship becomes even more destructive when Troy admits to his relationship with Alberta and he admits Gabriel to a mental institution by accident. The complication begins in Troy’s youth, when his father beat him unconscious. At that moment, Troy leaves home and begins a troubled life on his own, and gaining a self-destructive outlook on life. “Fences” has many instances that can be considered the climax, but the one point in the story where the highest point of tension occurs, insight is gained and a situation is resolved is when Rose tells Troy that Alberta died having his baby, Raynell.