What LESSON Did the Relatively Few “Exceptional” Slaves Teach Us about Self Esteem?
Some time ago, I read a book called “Slave Testimonies,” which is a compilation of: letters of slaves written to family members and their masters, interviews of fugitive and slaves freed both before and after the Civil War, transcriptions of testimonies of slaves during abolition meetings, and newspaper articles that covered stories told by runway slaves.
What was particularly interesting to me was that those journalists, abolitionists and historians that wrote the stories recanted by the fugitive slaves before the Civil War perceived that though these runaways that they had the privilege of interviewing were giving them a firsthand account of what slavery was like for them and millions of others, they were still left “wanting” for more because they knew they weren’t talking to the “average” slave. Read more…
