I was recently reading this book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00A735906/ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00A735906/ (title: When I Was a Slave: Memoirs

I was recently reading this book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00A735906/ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00A735906/ (title: When I Was a Slave: Memoirs from the Slave Narrative Collection) It contains interviews with slaves that were part of a public-works program geared towards writers/musicians and other white-collar workers during the great depression. It was a particularly fascinating text since lots of the interviewees were in their 90s and thus had experienced both the pre- and post-emancipation eras. The most consistent message I saw was that a group of oppressed people who had not been allowed to acquire any of the skills one needs to survive had been set free and asked to fend for themselves in a very hostile environment (jim crow laws and so on) and thus for most of that generation, it was like trading one problem for another. Also, there are several statistics compiled where the african-american community features as an outlier. For instance, breast-feeding rates in that community are far lower than the rest of the US [1]. I didn't know that this was a result of what women in the slavery-era went through but learned that from the book. It is important to read literature from this era. Tells us a lot about how just over a century ago, people employed rhetoric to convince themselves that slavery was really ok (see the talking points of the "overseers" and "speculators"). [1] http://thenationshealth.aphapublications.org/content/43/3/1.3.full http://thenationshealth.aphapublications.org/content/43/3/1....