Martin Luther King [antikvár]

Slavery For thousands of European immigrants in the 1800s, North America meant freedom, hope, the chance of a new life. For many black people, it meant an auctioneer selling them off like so many cattle. "Here's a fine healthy girl. Lots of flesh on her. Good teeth. Open your mouth, nigger - muscle enough to do a good day's work in the field and intelligent enough to be trained to the house. Fine breeding stock. What am I bid?" African people had been torn away from their homes and families in far-off lands, to be jammed together, chained and terrified, in the stench and darkness of the holds of sailing ships. Those ships brought them to America where they were sold as slaves. Sold to a lifetime as someone's property, their children sold in time to distant strangers if the master so wished, husbands sold away from wives, wives from husbands. At best treated as a well-loved dog, at worst worked without mercy; beaten, humiliated, mutilated, or killed outright. Emancipation Eventually many people in the United States came to believe that slavery was wrong, that all human beings had a right to be free. They believed that no human should be allowed to own another. But they could not convince everyone that slavery should be made illegal. Finally in the 1860s a war was fought to free the slaves. It was called the Civil War or the War Between the States. In 1863, before the end of that war, slavery was abolished and black people were emancipated - or set free. After the war, the US became rich and powerful, a place of opportunity and success. But at the edges of the great cities were the run-down shanty-towns " we have in common with all other men a natural right to our freedoms without being deprived of them by our fellow men as we are a freeborn people and have never forfeited this blessing by any compact or agreement whatever. But we were unjustly dragged by the cruel hand of power from our dearest friends and some of us stolen from the bosoms of our tender parents and from a populous pleasant and plentiful country and brought hither to be made slaves for life in a Christian land. Thus we are deprived of everything that hath a tendency to make life even tolerable " from "A Slave Petition for Freedom," 1774. 5