The Right to Freedom

“I think I never hated slavery so intensely…” stated by Frederick Douglass in the novel Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass (34).  This is exactly what I was thinking when I started to read this novel.  Frederick Douglass does a remarkable job in adding all the horrific details when writing about the torments of slaves.  In the 1800’s to the early 1900’s, slavery was known to be an acceptable act.  In fact, not owning slaves was out of the norm.  Slavery had “…an inevitable tendency to brutalize every noble faculty of man” (37).  Children were taken away from their mothers at a very young age and were stripped of their right to identity.  However, I question the white slaveholders’ acts of torment towards the African American slaves just because they had a different skin color.  How can something so superficial be the cause of the deaths of so many innocent lives?  Unfortunately this is the reality of our American history. 

America is known worldwide to be the country of freedom; however it is frightening to know that our government once allowed the enslavement of slaves.  Slaves were stripped of their freedom the moment they were born by being auctioned off to slave plantations.   “You will be free as soon as you are twenty-one, but I am a slave for life! Have not I as good as right to be free as you have?” (83).   The detainment of freedom the moment the slaves were born is, in my opinion, taking away their life.  What is a life worth living if it is full of excruciating pain and suffering?  No one deserves to be whipped until you scream, to be whipped until you hush, and to be whipped “…where the blood ran fastest” (51).   It is morally inhumane to treat a human being the way the whites did.  Yet they took no shame. 

One of the ways the white slaveholders took away the slaves freedom was by diminishing their right to education.  The white slaveholders would not allow the slaves to learn to read and write because they thought that knowledge was power.  “If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell.  A nigger should know nothing but to obey his mater…learning would spoil the best nigger in the world” (78).  This sense of mentality is just humiliating.  African Americans have tremendously helped develop our world today.  Imagine how much our society would have progressed if they were allowed the right to an education earlier.  In fact, now-a-days, there are African American doctors that try to save the lives of the white, even though they know what the whites have put their family ancestors through.  African American doctors have forgiven and set aside the horrifying acts the whites have done to their family because they know that a life is worth more than anything in the world. 

“I often found myself regretting my own existence, and wishing myself dead; and but for the hope of being free, I have no doubt but that I should have killed myself…” (85).  This statement saddens me because no young child should ever feel this way.  The desire to die at such a young age is detrimental to the child.  The devastating acts the whites have performed on the slaves during their enslavement are demeaning.  They treated slaves as if they were more like pets rather than human beings.  Douglass admits that slaves, along with horses, sheep, and swine “…were all ranked together at the valuation” (89).  The whites were dehumanizing African Americans, and they took pride in it.  I believe that students should be required to read Frederick Douglass’s novel, so that they understand the severity of slavery.  Students are taught about slavery in high school, but they aren’t exposed to the cruelty of it.  Everyone needs to understand the brutality of slavery in our American history and how the slaves earned their right to freedom once again.