African-American Slave Childhood
Keywords:
slave childhood, American slavery, racism, violence, slave narratives, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Booker T. Washington, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Up from SlaveryAbstract
The paper focuses on some issues of slave children’s lives in bondage. A significant source for learning about the African American slavery in the Antebellum South are the slave narratives written by (former) slaves. These narratives were mainly written to document events and experiences of slavery and also to add arguments for the growing abolitionist movement. The research of this paper is based on a comparative study of the narrative works Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass and Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington. These narratives provide detailed descriptions of how children lived during slavery as well as how they experienced violence and racism.
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