Narrative of Fredrick Douglass

Frederick Douglas, throughout his narrative, accounts his own experiences and analyzes them. He generalizes the details of white supremacy and how they made slaves ignorant. Douglas integrated both horror and his conquest to make something out of himself. Reading Frederick Douglas makes me wonder how people couldn't see the cruelty that existed right in front of their eyes. Douglas, most eloquently, tells the reader that some people thought this was a social practice but in turn it was not a social norm.
Frederick Douglas is able to incorporate an effective use of language. He uses tactics in the narrative to show how the institution of slavery works. Blacks were inferior to whites and were only good to work. During those times blacks were dehumanized. This theme reminded me of something similar that came up in an English class I had in the past. We studied poetry by black writers. A few that we focused on were about lynchings. The lynchings were punishment of alleged transgressors or to show power. They were also used as a tactic to manipulate the population and to control a certain area or areas. It reminded me of slavery because if a black would look at a slaveholder the wrong way they would get whipped. Well. . . in the case of lynching, when a black person looked at a white women a certain way they were in line to possibly be shot or lynched. In both cases whites wanted to make sure blacks knew their place and would use death as a consequence if they did not.
Blacks were treated so poorly during past times. When I read Douglass it made me realize that we should take time to read his story. We should accept that Douglass's story was real and not fabricated. We should not look away to the horrid punishment of the blacks but rather learn from them. Douglass is an inspiration because he overcame his harsh and troubling life to start anew; he dreamed only of what he knew he could do and more.


({{Information |Description=A man lynched from a tree. Face partially concealed by angle and headgear. |Source=Library of Congress[http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/npcc.12928] |Date=1925 |Author=National Photo Company |Permission={{PD-National Photo Company}} |)

(Below, taken from a poet named Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer, is a small excerpt from her poem called, Lynching).

Lynching

Have you ever heard of lynching in the great United States?
'Tis an awful, awful story that the Negro man relates,
How the mobs the laws have trampled, both the human and divine,
In their killing helpless people as their cruel hearts incline.

Not the heathen! 'Tis the Christian with the Bible in his hand,
Stands for pain and death to tyrannize the weaklings of the land;
Not the red man nor the Spaniard kills the blacks of Uncle Sam,
'Tis the white man of the nation who will lunch the sons of Ham.

To a limb upon the highway does a Negro's body hang,
Riddled with a hundred bullets from the bloody, thirsty gang;
Law and order thus defying, and there's none to say them nay.
"Thus," they say, to keep their power, "Negroes must be kept at bay."