On the recordJanuary 1, 1855
My poor mother, like many other slave-women, had many children, but NO FAMILY!
Said by
Frederick Douglass
Source
gutenberg.orgMy poor mother, like many other slave-women, had many children, but NO FAMILY!
From his autobiography, Douglass laments that slave mothers, despite bearing many children, were systematically denied the fundamental human experience of having a family.
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Treason had shot its poisonous roots deeper, and had spread its death-dealing branches further than any northern calculation had covered.
The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.
It only abolished slavery where it did not exist, and left it intact where it did exist.
Father he might be, and not be husband, and could sell his own child without incurring reproach, if in its veins coursed one drop of African blood.