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"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty..."

The activities of a literate slave named Gabriel in Richmond, Virginia, present a final critical view of Jeffersonian America. At the same time Gabriel also shows how fully African Americans embraced central currents of American politics and culture. Gabriel remains a difficult figure to fully reconstruct from surviving historical evidence. In fact, his last name is not definitively known, though he is usually referred to as Gabriel Prosser, after the name of the man who owned him.

Gabriel was a skilled artisan with several advantages over most field-working slaves of his day. Partly due to his skill as a blacksmith, Gabriel was "hired out" to work in many different places and enjoyed more autonomy and mobility than most plantation slaves. As an artisan, Gabriel was among the broad group of urban workers whose actions played a crucial role causing the American Revolution. As an occupational group, they were among the Revolution's biggest winners.

However, as an African American and a slave the benefits of the Revolution were not extended to Gabriel. Nevertheless, the republican ideology of the Revolution and the anti-elitist thrust of the Democratic-Republicans helped shape Gabriel's vision in leading a slave revolt.

Toussaint L'Ouverture followed in the footsteps of the French in abolishing slavery when he became leader of the Haitian Revolution in 1792.

The organizational requirements of a conspiracy to overthrow slavery necessarily shrouded the movement in secrecy. Apparently, however, Gabriel, and a small group of artisan leaders, expected about 1,000 slaves to follow them in a well-coordinated attack upon Richmond that targeted Federalists and merchants who were the most prominent residents of the city.

Gabriel expected "the poor white people" as well as "the most redoubtable republicans" to join his cause to create a more democratic republic in Virginia . He especially identified Quakers, Methodists, and Frenchmen as those whites who were most "friendly to liberty." The purpose of the rebels was clearly expressed in a banner under which they planned to march, which eloquently stated "Death or Liberty." The assault planned for August 30, 1800, however, never came together. Torrential rain caused confusion and a traitor from within the group warned white authorities of the impending attack.

Gabriel's careful planning demonstrates that some enslaved people actively resisted slavery and were well informed about the world beyond their own harsh circumstances. Given the heightened political violence of the 1790s, Gabriel believed that he could forge an alliance with some Democratic-Republicans against a common Federalist enemy. The timing of the revolt, just before the 1800 election, makes it a radical expression of anti-Federalism. Gabriel also secretly met with two Frenchmen who seemed to have promised him international assistance. Gabriel was well aware that the French Revolution had helped trigger the great slave revolt in Haiti in 1791. Perhaps the charismatic and talented Gabriel could have become a successful black political leader like Toussaint L'Ouverture.

An image of a slave auction in Richmond, Virginia, from an 1856 edition of The Illustrated London News.

Instead, Gabriel's slave conspiracy ended in severe repression. While no whites were killed in the revolt that never really got started, the state of Virginia executed 27 blacks, including Gabriel, by public hanging. Whites responded to the planned revolt, and another one linked to it in 1802, by tightening legal restrictions on slaves. For a brief period in the late 18th century white Virginians had modified certain elements of slavery.

Now many whites began to think that making the system slightly more humane had encouraged black resistance. As a result some of the advantages that slaves like Gabriel possessed were made illegal. For instance, literacy and allowing slaves to "hire out" for work in varied settings became illegal. Similarly, the Virginia legislature attempted to prevent enslaved people from piloting boats, a position from which they could travel too freely and learn about changes in the outside world that threatened white masters.

This newly repressive slave system was a tragic outcome for African-American collective action that had intended to liberate slaves. The reinvigorated slave societies of the south thrived in the 19th century and only ended with the massive violence of the Civil War. Nevertheless, the hypocrisy of slavery in a new nation dedicated to democracy was more obvious than ever before in American history. Though the brutal slave regime would continue to try and dehumanize the people it enslaved, it never fully succeeded.

As one member of Gabriel's Rebellion explained during the trial that would ultimately sentence him to death, "I have nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer, had he been taken by the British and put to trial by them. I have adventured my life in endeavoring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a willing sacrifice in their cause."

The Underground Railroad
Unlike Gabriel Prosser, most slaves didn't resort to violence. Many sought to escape to the north, a treacherous journey that could take between 2 months and a year. National Geographic offers this excellent site with images of the journey, key abolitionists, and a map of routes to the North.

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Africans in America
A topnotch site by WGBH for PBS Online which spans America's history of slavery in a 4-part series. Don't miss the interactive map in the narrative section of "Brotherly Love." Feel free to click away - every link is worth your time.

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African-American Odyssey
The largest black history exhibit ever presented by the Library of Congress covers the African-American experience from the slave trade to civil rights legislation in a 9-part series.

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The Census of 1790 revealed 59,557 free Negroes and 697,624 slaves in a population of 3,929,625; the most slaves were in Virginia (292,627), the fewest in New Hampshire (157).
Learn More...

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The American Colonization Society, a powerful private organization whose mission was to repatriate freed slaves to Africa, didn't dissolve until 1964.
Learn More...

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gabriel's rebellion: another view of virginia in 1800

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Gabriel's Rebellion: Another View of Virginia in 1800 [ushistory.org]

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"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty..." The activities of a literate slave named Gabriel in Richmond, Virginia, present a final critical view of Jeffersonian America.

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Jason Reynolds is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of many award-winning books, including Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks and more.

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Our key curriculum resource

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Chock full of helpful resources to help you get ready for tough conversations.

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Such a GREAT presentation on allowing students to interact with materials and show mastery in a way that is culturally relevant.

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Sharing Stories: Antiracism and Universal Design for Learning with Andratesha Fritzgerald

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Crash Course History #5-11

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In 48 episodes, John Green will teach you the history of the United States of America! This course is based off of the 2013 AP US History curriculum. By the ...

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Resources for the D. T. Howard Middle School school-wide reading of Stamped

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A wealth of information from the National Council of Teachers of English

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What an amazing time we had with Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi, hearing from them about their latest novel Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You! The discussion was timely and well received, so thank you for your participation, and a special thank-you to our moderator Sonja Cherry-Paul.

Below we've compiled a list of resources to help you continue the conversation within your communities.

IBRAM X. KENDI www.ibramxkendi.com
Facebook - /ibramxkendi
Twitter -@DrIbram
Instagram -@IbramXK

NEW BOOK COMING JUNE 16!

With bold art and thoughtful yet playful text, Antiracist Baby introduces the youngest readers and the grown-ups in their lives to the concept and power of antiracism. Learn more.

DR. SONJA CHERRY-PAUL
Educator's Guide

"This guide suggests a month-long approach to reading and discussing Stamped with middle-school and high-school readers in English, English language arts, social studies, history, and humanities classrooms." Access it here.

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland by Jonathan M. Metzl

Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Roads

How It Went Down by Kekla Magoon

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

It's Trevor Noah: Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (Adapted for Young Readers) by Trevor Noah

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson

March by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin

Monster by Walter Dean Myers

We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom by Bettina L. Love

White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

A Black Women's History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali N. Gross

Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists: A Graphic History of Women's Fight for Their Rights by Mikki Kendall

All American Boys by Brendan Kiely and Jason Reynolds

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Black Appetite. White Food.: Issues of Race, Voice, and Justice Within and Beyond the Classroom by Jamila Lyiscott

Black Brother, Black Brother by Jewell Parker Rhodes

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

Dear Martin by Nic Stone

Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan Metzl

The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race by Jesmyn Ward

For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood . . . and the Rest of Y'all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education by Christopher Emdin

The Gold Cadillac by Mildred D. Taylor

The Guide for White Women Who Teach Black Boys by Eddie Moore, Jr., Ali Michael, and Marguerite W. Penick-Parks

Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans by Kadir Nelson

The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter

How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

Letting Go of Literary Whiteness: Antiracist Literature Instruction for White Students by Carlin Borsheim-Black and Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides

Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds

Miles Morales: Spider-Man by Jason Reynolds

"Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children by Lisa Delpit

Murder on the Red River by Marcie Rendon

Not Light, But Fire: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Classroom by Matthew R. Kay

Piecing Me Together by Renee Watson

Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist by Eli Saslow

So You Want to Talk about Race by Ijeoma Oluo

Stamped: For our Classrooms, Homes, and Communities from Hachette Book Group

Sulwe by Lupita Nyong'o

Surviving Becky(s): Pedagogies for Deconstructing Whiteness and Gender by Cheryl E. Matias

The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession by Dana Goldstein

Teaching Race: How to Help Students Unmask and Challenge Racism by Steven Brookfield

There, There by Tommy Orange

This Book Is Anti-Racist: 20 Lessons on How to Wake Up, Take Action, and Do the Work by Tiffany Jewell

What If All the Kids Are White? Anti-bias Multicultural Education with Young Children and Families by Julie Olsen Edwards, Louise Derman-Sparks, and Patricia Ramsey

White Rage by Carol Anderson

*These texts were shared by participants within the chat during the live discussion.

What Antiracist Language Teachers Do

Antiracist language teachers consciously work to create safe learning environments for all students. This poster provides a description of what these teachers do.

Qualities of Antiracist ELA Curricula

Antiracist ELA curricula must celebrate and sustain diversity as part of educational justice in a changing world. This poster describes the qualities of such curricula.

Take a look at what we discussed with Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi.

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Stamped: Resources for your Classroom - NCTE

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IBRAM X. KENDI www.ibramxkendi.com Facebook - /ibramxkendi Twitter -@DrIbram Instagram -@IbramXK NEW BOOK COMING JUNE 16! With bold art and thoughtful yet playful text, Antiracist Baby introduces the youngest readers and the grown-ups in their lives to the concept and power of antiracism. Learn more.

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This is by no means a complete guide to introducing the topics covered by Stamped, but it is intended to provide you with ideas for supplemental materials to make connections to key characters with whom students may not be familiar and to extend learning.

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National Ambassador for Young People's Literature:  Write. Right. Rite.

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National Ambassador for Young People's Literature:  Write. Right. Rite.

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Sign up for the Grab the MIC newsletter: https://guides.loc.gov/jason-reynolds/grab-the-mic/newsletter

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Welcome to the "Write. Right. Rite.," a "GRAB THE MIC: Tell Your Story" video series! The "Write. Right. Rite." is meant to be an entertaining and inventive way to engage with the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, Jason Reynolds.

According to Reynolds, the "Write. Right. Rite." is all about learning the ritual of "authentic"-not to be confused with "correct" or "exact"-expression. Throughout the series, Reynolds shares his passion for storytelling while discussing topics like creativity, connection, and imagination. At the end of each video, Reynolds shares a prompt that encourages young people to work toward a specific idea. The activities are fun-filled and some are more challenging than others, but Reynolds always makes sure to include brainstorming "get-you-going" questions.

So, what do you say? Are you ready to dive into, try on, and work through all the "Write. Right. Rite." episodes?

Go for it!

Watch the Entire "Write. Right. Rite." Series:

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Research Guides: Jason Reynolds, National Ambassador for Young People's Literature: "Write. Right. Rite." Series

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On January 13, 2020, Jason Reynolds was announced as the seventh National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. Learn more about Jason and his activities as National Ambassador through this guide.

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A graphic organizer you can use

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Jason Reynolds Wants Young People’s Stories to be Heard

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Jason Reynolds Wants Young People’s Stories to be Heard

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Award-winning YA Author Jason Reynolds wants kids and teens to have the language they need for constructive conversations about race.

In his new book Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, Reynolds remixes Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning into an accessible primer on antiblack racism in America that he calls "not a history book."

Reynolds was recently named the seventh National Ambassador for Young People's Literature by the Library of Congress.

In his two-year appointment, Reynolds plans to travel the country and interview children about their lives and hometowns to create what he describes as "proof of life on record."
Produced by Victoria Chamberlin

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Jason Reynolds Wants Young People's Stories To be Heard - The Kojo Nnamdi Show

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Award-winning YA Author Jason Reynolds wants kids and teens to have the language they need for constructive conversations about race. In his new book Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, Reynolds remixes Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning into an accessible primer on antiblack racism in America that he calls "not a history book."

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More helpful materials on teaching Stamped

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All February Picks For Teen Readers
Using humor and a conversational style, author Jason Reynolds deftly reworks Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, exposing young adult readers to the history of America's racist past that textbooks leave out.

Get This Book

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"Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You" - NEA Read Across America Official Selection

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All February Picks For Teen Readers Using humor and a conversational style, author Jason Reynolds deftly reworks Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, exposing young adult readers to the history of America's racist past that textbooks leave out. Get This Book

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Jason Reynolds is the Bard of Black YA Fiction

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Jason Reynolds is the Bard of Black YA Fiction

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Jason Reynolds arrives for breakfast at the Busboys and Poets on V Street one winter Saturday, he looks, atypically for a writer, like a model-black Saint Laurent coat and boots, black Rag & Bone jeans, silver 1960 Rolex GMT-Master. (Luxury watches are his new collecting obsession.) On his fourth finger, though, is possibly the cheapest and also most constant item in his wardrobe: a wide silver-colored ring.

Reynolds, now 36, bought it for $8 when he was 15 or 16, at a church flea market in Prince George's County. He says that after he left the stand, the seller told police he'd stolen it. Officers questioned him, a confusing and terrifying turn of events. But one of them recognized him from another part of town-the U Street poetry scene-and said he was no thief. Reynolds doesn't remember being angry, only hugely grateful: "Like, Man, that was close.

"I wear it every day as a reminder that true wealth, by definition, is a good name. And my name at that moment had gotten me out of trouble."

Today Reynolds's name is much more widely known, for popularizing stories not so unlike that one: of what it can be like to grow up young and black in America. His young-adult novels-he has published 13 in the last six years-tackle fraught subjects including violence and deeply troubled families, and they typically star a male teenager in a tough city neighborhood, almost always underestimated or misunderstood.

Until recently, these were perspectives rarely seen in YA fiction. While lucrative, the genre was a historically homogeneous corner of the book world. But Reynolds, who grew up in Oxon Hill, has helped expand the pantheon in spectacular fashion. At 2.5 million copies sold, his books are monster bestsellers. He's a two-time National Book Award finalist and a Newbery honoree who headlines dozens of appearances before teenage audiences every year. He wrote Marvel Comics' first novelization of a non-white Spider-Man-the biracial Miles Morales-which earned him a cameo mention in the most recent Spider-Man movie. His novel Long Way Down, about a young man considering retaliation for his brother's murder, has been optioned by Universal and a producer of The Social Network. And in January, the Library of Congress named him the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, an honor that will send him on a cross-country tour.

At this rate, Reynolds could likely carry on easily in YA. With a seven-figure book deal, he has already netted accoutrements of a life he never imagined for himself-collections of Langston Hughes letters, programs from James Baldwin plays, a signed first edition of Toni Morrison's Beloved. Instead, he's making something of a professional swerve.

This month, the publisher Little, Brown released his first attempt at nonfiction, and as you might expect, it's neither a reductive nor comfortable tale. Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You is an adaptation of the trenchant, highly influential work by American University scholar Ibram X. Kendi. Reynolds's job: to make this history readable for the 11-to-17-year-old set.

How do you distill a 592-page, 400-year account of our country's most painful legacy into something a kid might actually want to read? With a lot of false starts, it turns out. As Reynolds says, "It was the hardest thing I've ever done."

To understand how Reynolds became a literary star whom kids flock to see, maybe all you need to know is that when he was their age, he wasn't a reader. He says he didn't finish a book until he was 17-Richard Wright's Black Boy -because the stuff he was exposed to didn't reflect life in his largely African American patch of Washington.

Not that he didn't love language. As a teenager, he started frequenting U Street spoken-word events designed for adults. Friends would come to see him at the now-defunct Bar Nun. "They'd be like, 'Bro, we don't know what you talkin' about, but we here,' " Reynolds says. " 'We are in the building, and we are going to support you.' "

At the University of Maryland, Reynolds self-published two poetry collections. He and a friend, Jason Douglas Griffin, also spent $30,000 printing a coffee-table book, with Reynolds running up debts on the kind of high-limit credit card no longer available to students. An agent was impressed by their nerve, and from there the two Jasons collaborated on a YA book, heavy on visuals, about a white artist and a black writer trying to make it in New York. It tanked. Reynolds wrote and wrote but couldn't sell anything.

Around 2009, when he was 25, he picked up Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, wanting to see why everyone in publishing made such a fuss about it. He couldn't relate to a girl getting her period, but he was struck by the honesty of Judy Blume's story. Next up was The Young Landlords by Walter Dean Myers, an early YA giant. The 1979 novel follows young black teens who take over a rundown building in Harlem-and speak like Reynolds's childhood friends. It felt like permission to tell stories he knew.

He began laboring over a gritty novel about an African American teen with a price on his head after a small misunderstanding: When I Was the Greatest, his breakout hit. Partly autobiographical, the story was inspired by Reynolds's older brother, a bruiser stabbed in the face at age 16 who came out of surgery to discover an unexpected bond with his younger, mellower sibling. It showed off what would become other hallmarks of a Reynolds novel: layered subplots yoked to supporting characters with rich backstories, dashes of humor (wherein the word "fartleks"-running jargon-becomes "fart licks"), and symbolism you don't discover until a second or third reading. In his most recent novel, there's a friendship handshake that, if you were to see it, would be sign language for "I can hear you even when the world can't."

Reynolds frequently examines friendships and their sustaining power in the lives of teenagers with broken families. (His parents split up when he was ten, and he was raised mostly by his mother, who worked in insurance. He's still so close to his childhood friends that they now have keys to his house.) "Track," a multi-book series, looks at four kids on an elite track team who become unlikely pals. They hail from varied backgrounds-one is albino, another's neighborhood is "not to be played with," a third is motherless-but all share the experience of running to escape something painful.

The point is to render life in its messy, three-dimensional particulars-and bust stereotypes. "There are so many basketball books. So many good ones. You know, because black kids just wanna play basketball," Reynolds says, tongue in cheek. "I'm not going to ever pretend that part of my mission isn't to push back against the stereotype about what black children are. I mean, we do everything like everybody else, we're children like everybody else's children, but we don't often get the opportunity to be that in media."

In 2017, Reynolds released Long Way Down, perhaps his knottiest plot and most daring stylistic treatment yet. Many of his novels read like a performance on the page, in the rhythmic prose of rap. ("The pancakes I had this morning had turned back into batter. A bitter batter, pitter-pattering up my throat," says one narrator who's nervous.) But Reynolds chose to tell this one entirely in verse.

The book takes place over 60 seconds, as a young man descends an elevator, meeting ghosts from his past who help him weigh whether to seek revenge for his brother's death. It's a scene from the author's own life: At age 19, Reynolds got a late-night call saying a friend had been brutally murdered. "There was a moment when I realized that I could completely avenge his death-that I had that kind of anger and that kind of pain," he says. He and some buddies met up to debate whether to retaliate. The novel isn't supposed to vilify youth facing a similar calculation, "or even to make any grandiose statement about gun violence," Reynolds explains. "It's more to humanize those young people who are going through that, who have nowhere else to put that pain."

The story spent 77 weeks on the New York Times YA bestseller list. "I was destroyed," wrote a critic in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Aja Clark, the manager of reading programs for DC libraries, used to teach high-school English and run a book club for African American youth. "I wish we had had his books then," says Clark, who often resorted to helping students analyze rap lyrics. "These boys never had the words to say how it felt walking down the street or experiencing anger and pain. With Mr. Reynolds, it's 'We're seen, we're heard, people can empathize with us.'"

Last year, people checked his books out of the DC libraries 2,028 times-basically, six times a day.

Kendi, the American University prof who founded its Antiracist Research & Policy Center, wasn't that into books in high school, either. So when he had the idea to adapt Stamped From the Beginning for a younger audience, he knew he'd need a partner. He had liked Reynolds's "Track" series; the bonds between such different characters "made me think about what's possible for this country," he says. After meeting Reynolds at the 2016 National Book Awards dinner, he felt the author was plenty intellectual for the job. "He's deeply reflective about his past and about what he's trying to do and why."

Reynolds fended off Kendi's requests. He wasn't much of a scholar, he'd say: "I don't know how to study, you know?"

Many months in, he finally relented-in hopes that a reimagined Stamped might change the conversation. With novels, Reynolds says, "you hope to make somebody laugh or cry-that's pretty much the end of it. Ibram's like, 'We have the opportunity to make a thing that could be a sea change. It's bigger than either one of us.' "

But how? Kendi gave Reynolds an outline of what he thought were the most essential stories, but Reynolds struggled. He filed two drafts that were just slightly edited versions of Kendi's tome-each an unwieldy 300 pages.

His editor reminded him that they wanted a Jason Reynolds book. Were they sure? "I'm gonna have to ruin what he's done," Reynolds remembers replying-ruin "one of the most important race documents of this century." Still, the directive freed him. Out came a chatty, irreverent story, one that's supposed to read, he says, like it's "from your barber who happens to be a history buff."

The book has the same hyper-personal opening as his novels, a character speaking directly to you-"Before we begin, let's get something straight"-who promises that the story won't feel like a list of dates with an occasional war thrown in. While Kendi's version begins with the Great Hurricane of 1635, Reynolds gets straight to race: "Uh-oh. The R-word. Which for many of us still feels rated R. Or can be matched only with another R word-run. But don't." Instead of a winding account of Gomes Eanes de Zurara, the 15th-century biographer who built up Portuguese Prince Henry's evangelical justification for enslaving Africans, Reynolds just dubs him "World's First Racist"-as if it's a senior-class superlative in one very messed-up yearbook-and explains that he's like a cheerleader who "made sure Prince Henry was looked at as a brilliant quarterback making ingenious plays, and that every touchdown was the mark of a superior player."

With its nicknames (Thomas "Contradiction" Jefferson), wordplay ("When the going gets tough, the tough get racist"), and chatty asides (cockamamie is the "best word ever"), the book shares DNA with Reynolds's fiction. The whole manuscript actually sounds as if it could be performed, down to written-in pauses-"P A U S E"-after particularly abhorrent historical ideas. "I'm probably the most proud of it," Reynolds says.

Yet for all the sweat of completing the book, he won't cop to worrying about its reception. "It's coming out of something that already exists, you know? All I was is the translator of the information."

Reynolds sometimes writes at Maketto, the high-concept coffee shop/clothing boutique/restaurant on Northeast DC's H Street, other times at home in nearby Kingman Park. He bought a condo there in 2018, a couple years after moving back from New York to be closer to his mother. He chose the neighborhood where she'd grown up, where his grandmother and cousins had resided for years, and he's been living that head-jerking experience common to Washington natives who leave for a while and return to find a whiter, glossier, bougier city. You can probably see where this story's going: It's all new material.

Reynolds has been working on a novel about a twentysomething who's obsessed with writing eulogies. The setting is a changing city-DC-that's grappling with the relationship between preservation and erasure. But as much as it sounds like a paean to his hometown, the project also scans like a new chance to prove himself: It's his first novel for adults.

"I don't know when this started, I don't know who said something the first time, but there's so much disparaging stuff that's said about people who write for kids," he tells me. "I choose to write for children because I love children, but my abilities are my abilities." He wants the freedom to write for any audience he pleases-and due respect. "You read To Kill a Mockingbird in eighth grade. You read Of Mice and Men in the seventh grade. You read Lord of the Flies in eighth grade. You call those classics. You think they're brilliant pieces of capital-L literature, but what I make is less than?"

His agent, naturally, is betting otherwise. She recently sent an archivist to town to start cataloguing Reynolds's papers-drafts with his editor's handwritten notations (some 20 takes of Long Way Down alone), pieces of Fabriano paper with possible book titles. It's a weird exercise for someone so young to sell rights to his literary estate-authors often do so late in life-but people have been asking, he says. No decisions have been made yet, but Reynolds is pretty sure his papers won't go to the highest bidder.

"I don't need the money," he says. "It's all about who I'm in conversation with. It's like, where's Baldwin? Where's Judy Blume?"

This article appears in the March 2020 issue of Washingtonian.

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Jason Reynolds, the Bard of Black YA Fiction, Just Released a Book on an Impossibly Challenging Topic

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Jason Reynolds arrives for breakfast at the Busboys and Poets on V Street one winter Saturday, he looks, atypically for a writer, like a model-black Saint Laurent coat and boots, black Rag & Bone jeans, silver 1960 Rolex GMT-Master. (Luxury watches are his new collecting obsession.)

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In addition to the resources on the DEI Guide, check out Britannica School in the Galileo folder in MyBackpack. We have access to tons of primary sources through this resource.

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Welcome to Britannica School, a safe, up-to-date, and age-appropriate information resource for Elementary, Middle, and High School.

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Booklist interview with Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi

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Booklist interview with Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi

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Shelf Care Interview: Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds on Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Booklist's Shelf Care Podcast

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Welcome to the Shelf Care Interview, an occasional conversation series where Booklist talks to book people.

This Shelf Care Interview is sponsored by Little Brown Books for Young Readers.

In this episode of the Shelf Care Interview, Maggie Reagan talks to Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds.

Ibram X. Kendi, a professor of history and international relations, is one of America's foremost historians and leading anti-racist voices. He is the New York Times' bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist, National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning, and the founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University in Washington, D.C.

Jason Reynolds is the New York Times bestselling multi-award winning author of many books for children, including the Track series and the Printz, Newbery, and Coretta Scott King Honor book, Long Way Down. Recently he was appointed the new National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, Jason's remix for young readers of Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped From the Beginning, comes out in March from Little Brown.

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This author is referenced in the Educators Guide. Here's an image you can use.

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There is SO MUCH on Phillis Wheatley, especially if you want to incorporate her poetry.  Check out some of these resources

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Although she was an enslaved person, Phillis Wheatley Peters was one of the best-known poets in pre-19th century America. Educated and enslaved in the household of prominent Boston commercialist John Wheatley, lionized in New England and England, with presses in both places publishing her poems, and paraded before the new republic's political leadership and the old empire's aristocracy, Wheatley was the abolitionists' illustrative testimony that blacks could be both artistic and intellectual. Her name was a household word among literate colonists and her achievements a catalyst for the fledgling antislavery movement.

Wheatley was seized from Senegal/Gambia, West Africa, when she was about seven years old. She was transported to the Boston docks with a shipment of "refugee" slaves, who because of age or physical frailty were unsuited for rigorous labor in the West Indian and Southern colonies, the first ports of call after the Atlantic crossing. In the month of August 1761, "in want of a domestic," Susanna Wheatley, wife of prominent Boston tailor John Wheatley, purchased "a slender, frail female child ... for a trifle" because the captain of the slave ship believed that the waif was terminally ill, and he wanted to gain at least a small profit before she died. A Wheatley relative later reported that the family surmised the girl-who was "of slender frame and evidently suffering from a change of climate," nearly naked, with "no other covering than a quantity of dirty carpet about her"-to be "about seven years old ... from the circumstances of shedding her front teeth."

After discovering the girl's precociousness, the Wheatleys, including their son Nathaniel and their daughter Mary, did not entirely excuse Wheatley from her domestic duties but taught her to read and write. Soon she was immersed in the Bible, astronomy, geography, history, British literature (particularly John Milton and Alexander Pope), and the Greek and Latin classics of Virgil, Ovid, Terence, and Homer. In "To the University of Cambridge in New England" (probably the first poem she wrote but not published until 1773), Wheatley indicated that despite this exposure, rich and unusual for an American slave, her spirit yearned for the intellectual challenge of a more academic atmosphere.

Although scholars had generally believed that An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of that Celebrated Divine, and Eminent Servant of Jesus Christ, the Reverend and Learned George Whitefield ... (1770) was Wheatley's first published poem, Carl Bridenbaugh revealed in 1969 that 13-year-old Wheatley-after hearing a miraculous saga of survival at sea-wrote "On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin," a poem which was published on 21 December 1767 in the Newport, Rhode Island, Mercury. But it was the Whitefield elegy that brought Wheatley national renown. Published as a broadside and a pamphlet in Boston, Newport, and Philadelphia, the poem was published with Ebenezer Pemberton's funeral sermon for Whitefield in London in 1771, bringing her international acclaim.

By the time she was 18, Wheatley had gathered a collection of 28 poems for which she, with the help of Mrs. Wheatley, ran advertisements for subscribers in Boston newspapers in February 1772. When the colonists were apparently unwilling to support literature by an African, she and the Wheatleys turned in frustration to London for a publisher. Wheatley had forwarded the Whitefield poem to Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, to whom Whitefield had been chaplain. A wealthy supporter of evangelical and abolitionist causes, the countess instructed bookseller Archibald Bell to begin correspondence with Wheatley in preparation for the book.

Wheatley, suffering from a chronic asthma condition and accompanied by Nathaniel, left for London on May 8, 1771. The now-celebrated poetess was welcomed by several dignitaries: abolitionists' patron the Earl of Dartmouth, poet and activist Baron George Lyttleton, Sir Brook Watson (soon to be the Lord Mayor of London), philanthropist John Thorton, and Benjamin Franklin. While Wheatley was recrossing the Atlantic to reach Mrs. Wheatley, who, at the summer's end, had become seriously ill, Bell was circulating the first edition of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), the first volume of poetry by an African American published in modern times.

Poems on Various Subjects revealed that Wheatley's favorite poetic form was the couplet, both iambic pentameter and heroic. More than one-third of her canon is composed of elegies, poems on the deaths of noted persons, friends, or even strangers whose loved ones employed the poet. The poems that best demonstrate her abilities and are most often questioned by detractors are those that employ classical themes as well as techniques. In her epyllion "Niobe in Distress for Her Children Slain by Apollo, from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book VI, and from a view of the Painting of Mr. Richard Wilson," she not only translates Ovid but adds her own beautiful lines to extend the dramatic imagery. In "To Maecenas" she transforms Horace's ode into a celebration of Christ.

In addition to classical and neoclassical techniques, Wheatley applied biblical symbolism to evangelize and to comment on slavery. For instance, " On Being Brought from Africa to America," the best-known Wheatley poem, chides the Great Awakening audience to remember that Africans must be included in the Christian stream: "Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, /May be refin'd and join th' angelic train." The remainder of Wheatley's themes can be classified as celebrations of America. She was the first to applaud this nation as glorious "Columbia" and that in a letter to no less than the first president of the United States, George Washington, with whom she had corresponded and whom she was later privileged to meet. Her love of virgin America as well as her religious fervor is further suggested by the names of those colonial leaders who signed the attestation that appeared in some copies of Poems on Various Subjects to authenticate and support her work: Thomas Hutchinson, governor of Massachusetts; John Hancock; Andrew Oliver, lieutenant governor; James Bowdoin; and Reverend Mather Byles. Another fervent Wheatley supporter was Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Wheatley was manumitted some three months before Mrs. Wheatley died on March 3, 1774. Although many British editorials castigated the Wheatleys for keeping Wheatley in slavery while presenting her to London as the African genius, the family had provided an ambiguous haven for the poet. Wheatley was kept in a servant's place-a respectable arm's length from the Wheatleys' genteel circles-but she had experienced neither slavery's treacherous demands nor the harsh economic exclusions pervasive in a free-black existence. With the death of her benefactor, Wheatley slipped toward this tenuous life. Mary Wheatley and her father died in 1778; Nathaniel, who had married and moved to England, died in 1783. Throughout the lean years of the war and the following depression, the assault of these racial realities was more than her sickly body or aesthetic soul could withstand.

On April 1, 1778, despite the skepticism and disapproval of some of her closest friends, Wheatley married John Peters, whom she had known for some five years, and took his name. A free black, Peters evidently aspired to entrepreneurial and professional greatness. He is purported in various historical records to have called himself Dr. Peters, to have practiced law (perhaps as a free-lance advocate for hapless blacks), kept a grocery in Court Street, exchanged trade as a baker and a barber, and applied for a liquor license for a bar. Described by Merle A. Richmond as "a man of very handsome person and manners," who "wore a wig, carried a cane, and quite acted out 'the gentleman,'" Peters was also called "a remarkable specimen of his race, being a fluent writer, a ready speaker." Peters's ambitions cast him as "shiftless," arrogant, and proud in the eyes of some reporters, but as a Black man in an era that valued only his brawn, Peters's business acumen was simply not salable. Like many others who scattered throughout the Northeast to avoid the fighting during the Revolutionary War, the Peterses moved temporarily from Boston to Wilmington, Massachusetts, shortly after their marriage.

Merle A. Richmond points out that economic conditions in the colonies during and after the war were harsh, particularly for free blacks, who were unprepared to compete with whites in a stringent job market. These societal factors, rather than any refusal to work on Peters's part, were perhaps most responsible for the newfound poverty that Wheatley Peters suffered in Wilmington and Boston, after they later returned there. Between 1779 and 1783, the couple may have had children (as many as three, though evidence of children is disputed), and Peters drifted further into penury, often leaving Wheatley Peters to fend for herself by working as a charwoman while he dodged creditors and tried to find employment.

During the first six weeks after their return to Boston, Wheatley Peters stayed with one of her nieces in a bombed-out mansion that was converted to a day school after the war. Peters then moved them into an apartment in a rundown section of Boston, where other Wheatley relatives soon found Wheatley Peters sick and destitute. As Margaretta Matilda Odell recalls, "She was herself suffering for want of attention, for many comforts, and that greatest of all comforts in sickness-cleanliness. She was reduced to a condition too loathsome to describe. ... In a filthy apartment, in an obscure part of the metropolis ... . The woman who had stood honored and respected in the presence of the wise and good ... was numbering the last hours of life in a state of the most abject misery, surrounded by all the emblems of a squalid poverty!"

Yet throughout these lean years, Wheatley Peters continued to write and publish her poems and to maintain, though on a much more limited scale, her international correspondence. She also felt that despite the poor economy, her American audience and certainly her evangelical friends would support a second volume of poetry. Between October and December 1779, with at least the partial motive of raising funds for her family, she ran six advertisements soliciting subscribers for "300 pages in Octavo," a volume "Dedicated to the Right Hon. Benjamin Franklin, Esq.: One of the Ambassadors of the United States at the Court of France," that would include 33 poems and 13 letters. As with Poems on Various Subjects, however, the American populace would not support one of its most noted poets. (The first American edition of this book was not published until two years after her death.) During the year of her death (1784), she was able to publish, under the name Phillis Peters, a masterful 64-line poem in a pamphlet entitled Liberty and Peace, which hailed America as "Columbia" victorious over "Britannia Law." Proud of her nation's intense struggle for freedom that, to her, bespoke an eternal spiritual greatness, Wheatley Peters ended the poem with a triumphant ring:

Britannia owns her Independent Reign,
Hibernia, Scotia, and the Realms of Spain;
And Great Germania's ample Coast admires
The generous Spirit that Columbia fires.
Auspicious Heaven shall fill with fav'ring Gales,
Where e'er Columbia spreads her swelling Sails:
To every Realm shall Peace her Charms display,
And Heavenly Freedom spread her gold Ray.

On January 2 of that same year, she published An Elegy, Sacred to the Memory of that Great Divine, The Reverend and Learned Dr. Samuel Cooper, just a few days after the death of the Brattle Street church's pastor. And, sadly, in September the "Poetical Essays" section of The Boston Magazine carried "To Mr. and Mrs.________, on the Death of their Infant Son," which probably was a lamentation for the death of one of her own children and which certainly foreshadowed her death three months later."

Phillis Wheatley Peters died, uncared for and alone. As Richmond concludes, with ample evidence, when she died on December 5, 1784, John Peters was incarcerated, "forced to relieve himself of debt by an imprisonment in the county jail." Their last surviving child died in time to be buried with his mother, and, as Odell recalled, "A grandniece of Phillis' benefactress, passing up Court Street, met the funeral of an adult and a child: a bystander informed her that they were bearing Phillis Wheatley to that silent mansion."

Recent scholarship shows that Wheatley Peters wrote perhaps 145 poems (most of which would have been published if the encouragers she begged for had come forth to support the second volume), but this artistic heritage is now lost, probably abandoned during Peters's quest for subsistence after her death. Of the numerous letters she wrote to national and international political and religious leaders, some two dozen notes and letters are extant. As an exhibition of African intelligence, exploitable by members of the enlightenment movement, by evangelical Christians, and by other abolitionists, she was perhaps recognized even more in England and Europe than in America. Early 20th-century critics of Black American literature were not very kind to Wheatley Peters because of her supposed lack of concern about slavery. She, however, did have a statement to make about the institution of slavery, and she made it to the most influential segment of 18th-century society-the institutional church. Two of the greatest influences on Phillis Wheatley Peter's thought and poetry were the Bible and 18th-century evangelical Christianity; but until fairly recently her critics did not consider her use of biblical allusion nor its symbolic application as a statement against slavery. She often spoke in explicit biblical language designed to move church members to decisive action. For instance, these bold lines in her poetic eulogy to General David Wooster castigate patriots who confess Christianity yet oppress her people:

But how presumptuous shall we hope to find
Divine acceptance with the Almighty mind
While yet o deed ungenerous they disgrace
And hold in bondage Afric: blameless race
Let virtue reign and then accord our prayers
Be victory ours and generous freedom theirs.

And in an outspoken letter to the Reverend Samson Occom, written after Wheatley Peters was free and published repeatedly in Boston newspapers in 1774, she equates American slaveholding to that of pagan Egypt in ancient times: "Otherwise, perhaps, the Israelites had been less solicitous for their Freedom from Egyptian Slavery: I don't say they would have been contented without it, by no Means, for in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance; and by the Leave of our modern Egyptians I will assert that the same Principle lives in us."

In the past decade, Wheatley scholars have uncovered poems, letters, and more facts about her life and her association with 18th-century Black abolitionists. They have also charted her notable use of classicism and have explicated the sociological intent of her biblical allusions. All this research and interpretation has proven Wheatley Peter's disdain for the institution of slavery and her use of art to undermine its practice. Before the end of this century the full aesthetic, political, and religious implications of her art and even more salient facts about her life and works will surely be known and celebrated by all who study the 18th century and by all who revere this woman, a most important poet in the American literary canon. -Original by Sondra A. O'Neale, Emory University

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Although she was an enslaved person, Phillis Wheatley Peters was one of the best-known poets in pre-19th century America. Educated and enslaved in the household of prominent Boston commercialist John Wheatley, lionized in New England and England, with presses in both places publishing her poems,...

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English professor Barbara Lewis talked about the time in which poet Phillis Wheatley lived. She spoke about Boston's treatment of slaves and Phillis... read more

English professor Barbara Lewis talked about the time in which poet Phillis Wheatley lived. She spoke about Boston's treatment of slaves and Phillis Wheatley's standing in her master's household. She also looked at the poet's reception in the international arena. Phillis Wheatley was an eighteenth century Boston slave, and the first African American to have her poetry published. close

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English professor Barbara Lewis talked about the time in which poet Phillis Wheatley lived. She spoke about Boston's treatment of slaves and Phillis Wheatley's standing in her master's household. She also looked at the poet's reception in the international arena. Phillis Wheatley was an eighteenth century Boston slave, and the first African American to have her poetry published.

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By Daniel T Hinchen, Reader Services

Recently, the MHS hosted a program called " No more, America,"* which featured a conversation with Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Peter Galison, both of Harvard University. In it, the two men reimagined a 1773 debate between graduating Harvard seniors Theodore Parsons and Eliphalet Pearson who deliberated on the compatibility of slavery and "natural law." In the program, Gates and Galison added a third contemporary voice to the argument, that of the then-enslaved Phillis Wheatley, the acclaimed poet who lived just over the Charles River from the two Harvard students.

Now, just over a week later, we recognize the anniversary of the first publication of one of Wheatley's poems. "On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin" appeared on December 21, 1767, in the Newport Mercury, a Rhode Island weekly newspaper. According to Vincent Carretta in his 2011 biography of Wheatley, this poem was not published again during Wheatley's lifetime.

When Wheatley submitted her poem to the Newport Mercury, she addressed a note to the printer which was to precede the poem.

Please to insert the following Lines, composed by a Negro Girl (belonging to one Mr. Wheatley of Boston) on the following Occasion, viz. Messrs Hussey and Coffin, as undermentioned, belonging to Nantucket, being bound from thence to Boston, narrowly escaped being cast away on Cape-Cod, in one of the late Storms; upon their Arrival, being at Mr. Wheatley's, and, while at Dinner, told of their narrow Escape, this Negro Girl at the same Time 'tending Table, heard the Relation, from which she composed the following verses.

On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin

Did Fear and Danger so perplex your Mind,

As made you fearful of the Whistling Wind?

Was it not Boreas knit his angry Brow

Against ? or did Consideration bow?

To lend you Aid, did not his Winds combine?

To stop your passage with a churlish Line,

Did haughty Eolus with Contempt look down

With Aspect windy, and a study'd Frown?

Regard them not; - the Great Supreme, the Wise,

Intends for something hidden from our Eyes.

Suppose the groundless Gulph had snatch'd away

Hussey and Coffin to the raging Sea;

Where wou'd they go? Where wou'd be their Abode?

With the Supreme and independent God,

Or made their Beds down in the Shades below,

Where neither Pleasure nor Conten can flow.

To Heaven their Souls with eager Raptures soar,

Enjoy the Bliss of him they wou'd adore.

Had the soft gliding Streams of Grace been near,

Some favourite Hope their fainting hearts to cheer,

Doubtless the Fear of Danger far had fled:

No more repeated Victory crown their Heads.

To see what materials the MHS holds related to Phillis Wheatley's life and work, you can search our online catalog, ABIGAIL, then consider Visiting the Library, but be sure to consult our online calendar for upcoming holiday closures.

* Watch a recording of the event that took place at the MHS on 12 December 2018.

References

Carretta, Vincent, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage, University of Georgia Press, 2011.

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The First Publication of Phillis Wheatley

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By Daniel T Hinchen, Reader Services Recently, the MHS hosted a program called " No more, America,"* which featured a conversation with Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Peter Galison, both of Harvard University. In it, the two men reimagined a 1773 debate between graduating Harvard seniors Theodore Parsons and Eliphalet Pearson who deliberated on the compatibility of slavery and "natural law."

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Benjamin Franklin & the American Philosophical Society

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Benjamin Franklin & the American Philosophical Society

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The American Philosophical Society is the oldest learned society in the United States. Founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743, it continues its mission of "promoting useful knowledge" through research, fellowships, and public outreach.

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The American Philosophical Society is the oldest learned society in the United States. Founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743, it continues its mission of "promoting useful knowledge" through research, fellowships, and public outreach.

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Phillis Wheatley - American Antiquarian Society manuscript poems

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Phillis Wheatley - American Antiquarian Society manuscript poems

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The Manuscript Poems of Phillis Wheatley at AAS | American Antiquarian Society

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Ashley Cataldo, Curator of Manuscripts, (acataldo@mwa.org) explains how two manuscript poems by Phillis Wheatley (1753 - 1784) entered the AAS collection. "To the University of Cambridge," dated 1767, was evidently written to the students at Harvard College, admonishing them to learn and live virtuously through their Redeemer.

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Phillis Wheatley - National Women's History Museum bio

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Phillis Wheatley - National Women's History Museum bio

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MLA - Michals, Debra. "Phillis Wheatley." National Women's History Museum. National Women's History Museum, 2015. Date accessed.

Chicago - Michals, Debra. "Phillis Wheatley." National Women's History Museum. 2015. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/phillis-wheatley.

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Despite spending much of her life enslaved, Phillis Wheatley was the first African American woman to publish a book of poems.

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Phillis Wheatley Peters was born in West Africa in 1753. At the age of eight, she was kidnapped, enslaved in New England, and sold to John Wheatley of Boston. The first African-American and one of the first women to publish a book of poetry in the colonies, Wheatley learned to read and write English by the age of nine, familiarizing herself with Latin, Greek, the Bible, and selected classics at an early age. She began writing poetry at thirteen, modeling her work on the English poets of the time, particularly John Milton, Thomas Gray, and Alexander Pope. Her poem "On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield" was published as a broadside in cities such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia and garnered Wheatley national acclaim. This poem was also printed in London. Over the next few years, she would print a number of broadsides elegizing prominent English and colonial leaders.

In 1771, Wheatley accompanied John Wheatley's son, Nathaniel, to London. She was well received in London and wrote to a friend of the "unexpected and unmerited civility and complaisance with which I was treated by all." In 1773, thirty-nine of her poems were published in London as Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, which became the first book of poetry published by an enslaved African-American in the United States. The book includes many elegies as well as poems on Christian themes; it also includes poems dealing with race, such as the often-anthologized "On Being Brought from Africa to America." She returned to America in 1773.

After the elder Wheatleys died, Phillis was left to support herself as a seamstress and poet. It is unclear precisely when Wheatley was freed from slavery, although scholars suggest it occurred between 1774 and 1778. In 1776, Wheatley wrote a letter and poem in support of George Washington, who replied with an invitation to visit him in Cambridge, stating that he would be "happy to see a person so favored by the muses." In 1778, she married John Peters, who kept a grocery store. They had three children together, all of whom died young. Wheatley experienced difficulty publishing her poems, soliciting subscribers for a new volume that would include thirty-three new poems and thirteen letters, but unable to raise the funds. Phillis Wheatley, who had once been internationally celebrated, died alone in a boarding house on December 5, 1784. She was thirty-one years old. Many of the poems for her proposed second volume disappeared and have never been recovered.

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Phillis Wheatley Peters was born in West Africa in 1753. At the age of eight, she was kidnapped, enslaved in New England, and sold to John Wheatley of Boston.

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Phillis Wheatley - "On Being Brought from Africa to America"

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Phillis Wheatley - "On Being Brought from Africa to America"

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Classroom Activities

1. Warm-up: Look at the image of Phillis Wheatley here. What stands out to you about the image? Look at the title page of the book. What else do you see?

2. Before Reading the Poem: Read Wheatley's biography here. What surprised you about Wheatley? Why?

3. Reading the Poem: Read the poem " On Being Brought from Africa to America" by Phillis Wheatley silently. What do you notice about the poem? Annotate for any words or phrases that stand out to you or any questions you might have. ( Teachers, if you are meeting synchronously, we suggest sharing a video screen that allows for students to annotate together. If you are meeting asynchronously, we suggest asking students to post/share their annotations in your online classroom platform.)

4. Listening to the Poem ( enlist two volunteers to read the poem aloud): Listen as the poem is read aloud twice, and write down any additional words and phrases that stand out to you. ( Note, the reading of the poem starts at 3:01. Teachers, for synchronous meetings, you could ask two students to read the poem, and for asynchronous meetings, students could read the poem on their own or with a family member.)

5. Small-group Discussion: Share what you noticed in the poem with a small group of students. Based on the details you just shared with your small group, how would you describe the tone of the poem? Why? How do the first four lines compare to the last four lines?

6. Whole-class Discussion: Before discussing the poem, read this short essay about Wheatley's poem by Camille T. Dungy here. What might the significance of the word "mercy" in the poem be? How is this poem a critique of slavery and/or religion? ( Teachers, for synchronous discussions, you can use whole class discussion or break-out rooms. For asynchronous discussions, you might want to ask students to respond in writing. If you feel like your students might need more context, this article here about Phillis Wheatley might be helpful.)

7. Extension for Grades 7-8: Watch or listen to the video of Bob Marley's "Buffalo Soldier" here. Watch or listen to the video twice. What words or phrases stand out to you? What lines are repeated? How does this song compare to the poem? Write a paragraph comparing the song, or another song of your choice, and the poem. ( Teachers, you might also wish to create space on an online platform for students to share and respond to each other's poems.)

8. Extension for Grades 9-12: Read Eve Ewing's poem "1773" here, which is a poem honoring Phillis Wheatley. Read the rest of the poems and stories featured in the 1619 project. After reading, research a seminal moment in American history and write a poem or story about that moment. Share with your classmates. ( Teachers, you might want to consider creating space on an online platform for students to share their writing and respond to each other's work.)

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teach this poem: "on being brought from africa to america" by phillis wheatley

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Teach This Poem: "On Being Brought from Africa to America" by Phillis Wheatley

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Teach This Poem, though developed with a classroom in mind, can be easily adapted for remote learning, hybrid learning models, or in-person classes. Please see our suggestions for how to adapt this lesson for remote or blended learning. We have also noted suggestions when applicable and will continue to add to these suggestions online.

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PHILLIS WHEATLEY (Poet) - Black History Month

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Phillis Wheatley - African poetry in America lesson

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Phillis Wheatley - African poetry in America lesson

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Bio

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Public domain image

Gabriel Prosser was the leader of an unsuccessful slave revolt in Richmond, Virginia in 1800. Born into slavery around 1775, Gabriel Prosser was owned by Thomas H. Prosser of Henrico County, Virginia. Little is known of Prosser's life before the revolt that catapulted him into notoriety. Prosser's two brothers, Solomon and Martin and his wife, Nanny, were all owned by Thomas Prosser and all participated in the insurrection.

Gabriel Prosser at the time of the insurrection was twenty-four years old, six feet two inches, literate, and a blacksmith by trade. He was described by a contemporary as "a fellow of courage and intellect above his rank in life." With the help of other slaves including Jack Bowler and George Smith, Prosser devised a plan to seize control of Richmond by killing all of the whites (except the Methodists, Quakers and Frenchmen) and then establishing a Kingdom of Virginia with himself as monarch.

Prosser and the other revolt leaders were probably influenced by the American Revolution and more recently the French and Haitian Revolutions with their rhetoric of freedom, equality and brotherhood. In the months prior to the revolt Prosser recruited hundreds of supporters and organized them into military units. Although Virginia authorities never determined the extent of the revolt, they estimated that several thousand planned to participate including many who were to be armed with swords and pikes made from farm tools by slave blacksmiths.

Prosser planned to initiate the insurrection on the night of August 30, 1800. However, earlier in the day two slaves who wanted to protect their masters betrayed the plot to Virginia authorities. Governor James Monroe alerted the militia. A rainstorm delayed the uprising by 24 hours, preventing Prosser's army from assembling outside Richmond and providing the militia crucial time to prepare a defense of the city. Realizing their plan had been discovered, Prosser and many of his followers dispersed into the countryside. About 35 leaders were captured and executed but Prosser escaped to Norfolk where he was betrayed by fellow slaves who claimed the reward for his capture on September 25. Prosser was returned to Richmond and tried for his role in the abortive uprising. He was found guilty on October 6, 1800 and executed the following day.

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Gabriel Prosser was the leader of an unsuccessful slave revolt in Richmond, Virginia in 1800. Born into slavery around 1775, Gabriel Prosser was owned by Thomas H. Prosser of Henrico County, Virginia. Little is known of Prosser's life before the revolt that catapulted him into ... Read MoreGabriel Prosser (1775-1800)

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PBS video

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Gabriel was born in 1776, on Thomas Prosser's tobacco plantation in Henrico County, Virginia. When he was about ten, Gabriel and his brother Solomon began training as blacksmiths. Although almost nothing is known about Gabriel's parents, it is likely that his father was a blacksmith, because skills were typically passed from generation to generation in Virginia slave families. As a child, Gabriel was also taught to read and write.

Gabriel was unusually intelligent, and unusually large; by the age of 20 he was six feet, two or three inches tall, and was enormously strong from his years of smithing. Even older slaves saw him as a leader.

Prosser died in 1798, and his son Thomas Henry Prosser, at the age of 22, became the new master of the Brookfield Plantation. Thomas Henry was a cruel and economically ambitious master, and it is likely that he pushed his slaves too hard. He also hired out some of his skilled slaves, including Gabriel and Solomon, a practice that was common in Virginia at the time -- and one that allowed slaves more freedom than some Virginians were comfortable with. Although the state legislature made laws attempting to curtail hiring out, they were not enforced, largely because local merchants and artisans relied heavily on the cheap labor that they could get from hiring slaves, as opposed to white tradesmen.

Thomas Henry allowed Gabriel to hire himself out to masters in and around Richmond, giving him access to a certain amount of freedom, as well as money. Gabriel also met fellow hired slaves, free blacks, and white laborers, with whom he shared work and leisure time.

Many free blacks, though they faced overwhelming discrimination, managed to prosper as small business owners in the Richmond economy. Even more threatening to city authorities were the bonds that were formed among slaves, free blacks and working class whites, who worked and socialized together, especially in a city in which whites, and especially wealthy whites, were in the minority. Laws were passed curtailing socializing between slaves and free blacks, and interracial grog shops were raided.

Gabriel experienced several strong influences: the rhetoric of the American Revolution; the uprising in Saint Domingue, the radical words of white artisans who championed the working class; the success exhibited by free blacks; his own hatred of the merchants who routinely cheated the slaves they hired; his desire to be free and to prosper. He was moving toward a revolutionary stance that Solomon described in his court confession: "My brother Gabriel was the person who influenced me to join him and others in order that (as he said) we might conquer the white people and possess ourselves of their property."

In September of 1799, Gabriel, Solomon, and a fellow slave named Jupiter stole a pig. When caught by white overseer Absalom Johnson, Gabriel wrestled him to the ground and bit off most of his ear. In court, he was found guilty of maiming a white man, a capital offense, but Gabriel escaped execution through a loophole called "benefit of clergy," that allowed him to choose public branding over execution, if he could recite a verse from the Bible. Gabriel recited his verse, and then was branded in his left hand in open court. The branding, as well as the month he spent in jail, was the last in a long chain of offenses that pushed him toward open rebellion.

Inspired by Saint Domingue and spurred on by working-class talk of a truly egalitarian society, Gabriel decided it was time to act. He believed that if the slaves rose and fought for their rights, the poor white people would join them. His plan involved seizing Capitol Square in Richmond and taking Governor James Monroe as a hostage, in order to bargain with city authorities. According to later testimony, one of the conspirators also "was to go to the nation of Indians called Catawbas to persuade them to join the negroes to fight the white people." It was also believed that a French "army was landed at South Key, which they hoped would assist them." Their banner would bear the motto "death or Liberty," the battle cry of Saint Domingue.

Gabriel conveyed his plan to Solomon and Ben, another of Prosser's slaves, and the men began recruiting soldiers. They were later joined by other recruiters, most notably Jack Ditcher and Ben Woolfolk. The rebels did not include women in their army. While the majority of the men were slaves, the conspirators also drew free blacks and a few white workers to their cause, especially as they began recruiting in Richmond. Two Frenchmen and militant abolitionists, Charles Quersey and Alexander Beddenhurst, joined the ranks as leaders. A slave recruit named King, when told of the plot, said, "I was never so glad to hear anything in my life. I am ready to join them at any moment. I could slay the white people like sheep."

The conspirators continued recruiting from Richmond and other Virginia towns, including Petersburg, Norfolk and Albemarle, and from the counties of Caroline and Louisa. After some difficulty, they were also successful in recruiting slaves from the Henrico County countryside. In this way they were preparing for the most far-reaching slave revolt ever planned in U.S. history. They also amassed weapons and began hammering swords out of scythes and molding bullets.

By August of 1800, Gabriel's army was ready. Their plan, necessarily more elaborate now, included the taking of Norfolk and Petersburg by the men living there. Gabriel announced that they would move on the night of Saturday, August 30. As the lieutenants delivered news of the date to the outlying areas, a rumor of insurrection surfaced among Richmond whites, who reported it to Governor Monroe, who ignored it.

On August 30, a torrential rain began, described by James Callender, a person in jail for violating the sedition law, as "the most terrible thunder Storm... that I ever witnessed in this State." A handful of men gathered at the appointed meeting spot, but it soon became clear that the quickly rising water would make key roads and bridges impassable.

The conspirators decided to postpone until Sunday evening, August 31. But before they had a chance to carry out their plan, slaves in two different locations cracked under the pressure and told their masters. Soon Governor Monroe was alerted, and white patrols, later joined by the state militia, began roaming the countryside searching for rebels. Gabriel and Jack Ditcher disappeared. Others eluded capture for several days, but by September 9, almost 30 slaves were in jail awaiting trial in the court of "Oyer and Terminer," a special court in which slaves were tried without benefit of jury.

When the trials began on September 11, Gabriel and Ditcher were still at large, and white authorities had no idea of how extensive the insurrection had been. But white Virginians were terrified at the thought of how close the danger had come. One white fear, typical in times of black rebellion, was that black men were out to get white women.

One strategy that the white authorities used was to offer a full pardon to a handful of slaves who were willing to give testimony against the other conspirators. Gervas Storrs and Joseph Seldon, two of the court magistrates, found two key witnesses in this way: Ben, one of Prosser's slaves, and Ben Woolfolk. Prosser's Ben came forward first, and his testimony sent a number of slaves from his area to the gallows, including Gabriel's brothers Solomon and Martin. But Prosser's Ben did not have enough contact with slaves from the outlying areas, and so the court looked to Ben Woolfolk to give the damning evidence. Other slaves provided further testimony.

On September 14, Gabriel swam to a schooner called Mary on the James River. He asked to see the captain, a white man named Richardson Taylor. Two black men on board, Taylor's former slave Isham and a slave named Billy, identified Gabriel as the leader of the plot. Though a former overseer, Taylor had apparently had a change of heart about slavery. He attempted to take Gabriel to freedom. However, when the ship docked in Norfolk, Billy alerted white authorities to Gabriel's presence on board, no doubt thinking of the $300 reward being offered for Gabriel's capture. Gabriel and Taylor were both arrested. Billy was rewarded, but not what he had expected. He received $50, far below what he needed to purchase his freedom.

On October 6, Gabriel was put on trial. Several witnesses came forward, but Gabriel himself refused to make a statement. He was sentenced to be executed the next day, but asked that his sentence not be carried out until October 10, so that he could be executed along with six other slaves who were to hang on that day. The court agreed, but on October 10 they hanged the slaves in three different locations; Gabriel was hanged alone on the town gallows.

In all, the trials lasted almost two months, and 26 slaves were executed by hanging; one more died by hanging while in custody. At least 65 slaves were tried; of those not hanged, some were transported to other states, some were found not guilty, and a few were pardoned. By law, slaveholders had to be reimbursed by the state for lost property, so in cases where slaves were executed or transported, their masters were reimbursed for their total worth declared by the court. Virginia paid over $8900 to slaveholders for the executed slaves.

Although most of the suspects were tried in Richmond, blacks captured in other counties were tried in those locations. Many of them shared the same fates as the Richmond slaves. However, in Hanover County, two slaves escaped with the help of blacks outside the prison and were never recovered. In Norfolk County, the magistrates questioned slaves and working-class whites alike, trying to find witnesses. But no one, including the accused slaves, would come forward with evidence, and the slaves were released. In Petersburg, four free blacks were arrested, but they too were released after the frustrated authorities could find no viable witnesses. There were slaves willing to give condemning evidence, but the testimony of slaves against free people was inadmissible in Virginia courts.

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Africans in America/Part 3/Gabriel's Conspiracy

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Gabriel was born in 1776, on Thomas Prosser's tobacco plantation in Henrico County, Virginia. When he was about ten, Gabriel and his brother Solomon began training as blacksmiths. Although almost nothing is known about Gabriel's parents, it is likely that his father was a blacksmith, because skills were typically passed from generation to generation in Virginia slave families.

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(1776 - October 10, 1800), today commonly known as Gabriel Prosser, was a literate enslaved blacksmith who planned a large slave rebellion in the Richmond area in the summer of 1800. Information regarding the revolt was leaked prior to its execution, and he and twenty-five followers were taken captive and hanged in punishment. In reaction, Virginia and other state legislatures passed restrictions on free blacks, as well as prohibiting the education, assembly, and hiring out of slaves, to restrict their chances to learn and to plan similar rebellions.

In 2002 the City of Richmond passed a resolution in honor of Gabriel on the 202nd anniversary of the rebellion. In 2007 Governor Tim Kaine gave Gabriel and his followers an informal pardon, in recognition that his cause, "the end of slavery and the furtherance of equality for all people-has prevailed in the light of history".

Born into slavery at Brookfield, a tobacco plantation in Henrico County, Virginia, Gabriel had two brothers, Solomon and Martin. They were all held in bondage by slaveholder Thomas Prosser, the owner of Brookfield. As Gabriel and Solomon were trained as blacksmiths, their father may have had that skill. Gabriel was also taught to read and write.

By the mid-1790s, as Gabriel neared the age of twenty, he stood "six feet two or three inches high". His long and "bony face, well made", was marred by the loss of his two front teeth and "two or three scars on his head". White people as well as Black people regarded the literate young man as "a fellow of great courage and intellect above his rank in life".

Gabriel's Rebellion

Gabriel planned the revolt during the spring and summer of 1800. On August 30, 1800, Gabriel intended to lead slaves into Richmond, but the rebellion was postponed because of rain. The slaves' owners had suspicion of the uprising, and two slaves told their owner, Mosby Sheppard, about the plans. He warned Virginia's Governor, James Monroe, who called out the state militia. Gabriel escaped downriver to Norfolk, but he was spotted and betrayed there by another slave for the reward offered by the state. That slave did not receive the full reward.

Gabriel was returned to Richmond for questioning, but he did not submit. Gabriel, his two brothers, and 23 other slaves were hanged.

The historian Douglas Egerton offered a new perspective on Gabriel in his book Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 & 1802 (1993). He based this on extensive primary research from surviving contemporary documents. Egerton found that Gabriel was a skilled blacksmith who was mostly "hired out" by his owner in Richmond foundries. Hiring out was the way that slaveholders earned money from their slaves, whom they needed less for labor as they had reduced the cultivation of tobacco as a crop. The market for tobacco was depressed, but Virginia planters also had to deal with depleted soils because of the crop. Slaveholders leased skilled slaves for jobs available in Virginia industries. Egerton concluded that Gabriel would have been stimulated and challenged at the foundries by interacting with co-workers of European, African and mixed descent. They hoped Thomas Jefferson's Republicans would liberate them from domination by the wealthy Federalist merchants of the city. In that environment, Gabriel also would have heard about the uprising and struggles of slaves in Saint Domingue.

Egerton believed that Gabriel had two white co-conspirators, at least one of whom was identified as a French national. He found reports that documentary evidence of their identity or involvement was sent to Governor Monroe but never produced in court, and suggests that it was to protect the Democratic-Republican Party.[citation needed ] The internal dynamics of Jefferson's and Monroe's party in the 1800 elections were complex. A significant part of the Republican base were major planters, colleagues of Jefferson and Madison. Egerton believes that any sign that white radicals, and particularly Frenchmen, had supported Gabriel's plan could have cost Jefferson the presidential election of 1800. Slaveholders feared such violent excesses as those related to the French Revolution after 1789 and the rebellion of slaves in Saint-Domingue. Egerton believed that Gabriel planned to take Governor Monroe hostage to negotiate an end to slavery. Then he planned to "drink and dine with the merchants of the city".

Egerton noted that Gabriel did not order his followers to kill all whites except Methodists, Quakers and Frenchmen; rather, he instructed them not to kill any people in those three categories. During this period, Methodists and Quakers were active missionaries for manumission, and many slaves had been freed since the end of the Revolution in part due to their work.[citation needed ] The French were considered allies as they had abolished slavery in their Caribbean colonies in 1794.

Gabriel initially escaped on a ship owned by a former overseer. Egerton found that he was a recently converted Methodist who repeatedly overlooked information as to Gabriel's true identity. A slave hired out to work on the ship turned in Gabriel, seeking the reward so that he could purchase his own freedom. The state paid him only $50, not the $300 advertised.

Gabriel Prosser's uprising was notable not because of its results-the rebellion was quelled before it could begin-but because of its potential for mass chaos and widespread violence. In Virginia in 1800, 39.2 percent of the total population were slaves; they were concentrated on plantations in the Tidewater area and west of Richmond. No reliable numbers existed regarding slave and free black conspirators; most likely, the number of men actively involved numbered only several hundred.

From 1780 to 1810, the number of slaves freed in the Upper South had grown markedly, as some slaveholders were inspired to free slaves by the American Revolution and its ideals. Methodists and Quakers especially worked to convince slaveholders to manumit slaves. The percentage of free blacks as part of the black population rose from less than 1 percent in 1782 to more than 10 percent by 1810. By that time, Virginia's free blacks numbered 30,466 or 7.2 percent of the total black population. By 1810 nearly three-quarters of Delaware's blacks were free.

Some Virginia slaveholders were nervous about the sharp increase in the number of free blacks in the slave state. They were uneasy as well by the violent aftermath of the French Revolution and the uprising of slaves in the 1790s in Saint Domingue. In 1792 France granted social equality to free people of color, and in 1793 French Revolutionary commissioners in Saint-Domingue granted freedom to all the slaves. Whites and free people of color, some of whom were also slaveholders, emigrated as refugees to the US during the years of upheaval, now known as the Haitian Revolution. They added to the population of free people of color in Charleston, Richmond and New Orleans. In addition, slaveholders brought thousands of ethnic African slaves with them, especially adding to the African population of New Orleans. In 1804 the black and mulatto revolutionaries succeeded in gaining freedom, declaring the colony the independent black nation of Haiti.

Gabriel had been able to plan the rebellion because of relatively lax rules of movement for slaves between plantations and the city, as so many had been hired out, and others traveled to and from the city on errands for their masters. After the rebellion, many slaveholders greatly restricted the slaves' rights of travel when not working. Fears of a slave revolt regularly swept major slaveholding communities.

Prior to the rebellion, Virginia law had allowed education of slaves to read and write, and training of slaves in skilled trades. After the rebellion, and after a second conspiracy was discovered in 1802 among enslaved boatmen along the Appomattox and Roanoke rivers, the Virginia Assembly in 1808 banned hiring out of slaves and required freed blacks to leave the state within 12 months or face re-enslavement (1806). Free blacks had to petition the legislature to stay in the state, and were often aided in that goal by white friends or allies. In addition to the catalyst of Gabriel's Rebellion, the law against residency was prompted by the marked increase in population of free people of color in Virginia, as noted above in manumission of slaves after the American Revolution. The very existence of free blacks challenged the conditions of slave states.

Gabriel's rebellion served as an important example of slaves' taking action to gain freedom.

In 2002 the City of Richmond adopted a resolution to commemorate the 202nd anniversary "of the execution of the patriot and freedom fighter, Gabriel, whose death stands as a symbol for the determination and struggle of slaves to obtain freedom, justice and equality as promised by the fundamental principles of democratic governments of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the United States of America".

In the fall of 2006, the Virginia State Conference of the NAACP requested Gov. Tim Kaine pardon Gabriel in recognition of his contributions to the civil rights struggle of African Americans and all peoples.

On August 30, 2007, Governor Kaine informally pardoned Gabriel and his co-conspirators. Kaine said that Gabriel's motivation had been "his devotion to the ideals of the American revolution-it was worth risking death to secure liberty". Kaine noted that "Gabriel's cause-the end of slavery and the furtherance of equality of all people-has prevailed in the light of history", and added that "it is important to acknowledge that history favorably regards Gabriel's cause while consigning legions who sought to keep him and others in chains to be forgotten". The pardon was informal because it was posthumous.

Arna Bontemps wrote Black Thunder (1936), a historical novel based on Gabriel's Rebellion.

In Roots, Alex Haley's historical fiction, the rebellion is heard of by the book's characters.

In Sally Hemings, Barbara Chase-Riboud's 1979 novel about Hemings's relationship with Thomas Jefferson, Monroe writes Jefferson asking his advice on what to do about the insurrectionists still in jail after "(m)ore than thirty-five" had been executed. Hemings intercedes on their behalf, telling Jefferson, "I think there has been enough hanging", and suggests they be exiled instead. Although it is not made explicit in the novel, it is implied that Jefferson followed her suggestion and advised Monroe accordingly. At the end of the chapter, Hemings says, "I heard that the last of Gabriel's rebels had been reprieved and banished from Virginia by James Monroe. I had not pleaded in vain."

Tim Barry, a singer/songwriter from Richmond, wrote and performed "Prosser's Gabriel" for the album 28th & Stonewall. It chronicles the events of Gabriel's life, focusing on the attempted revolution.

Gabriel is mentioned in Public Enemy's song "Prophets of Rage".

Gabriel is the hero of a cleverly subversive sea shanty recorded some forty years after events (in Chapter 17 of Frederick Marryat's book, (1840).) In the book the shanty is sung by an African American sailor. It refers to its subject as "General" Gabriel, and claims a bounty of £1000 was put on his head. After being betrayed and captured he is heavily loaded with chains and "a troop of light horse" is appointed to guard him. He is taken before the governor, whose name is slightingly alluded to ("Monroe he set up for go[ver]nor"). The whole country turns out to see him. Gabriel makes a last speech in which he proclaims his own "right name" and that he is "here today and gone tomorrow / I did not come for to stay for e[v]er". He is taken to the gallows in a wagon drawn by four grey horses. Commenting with heavy irony that the execution was a "Very sad loss to Major Prosser" the verse concludes by describing Gabriel as the man "who almost ruined old Virginny".

Library of Virginia:letters, trial transcripts etc. [4]

Encyclopedia Virginia: Gabriel's Conspiracy [5]

Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. New York: International Publishers, 1943.

Egerton, Douglas R. Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Nicholls, Michael L. Whispers of Rebellion: Narrating Gabriel's Conspiracy. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2012.

Schwarz, Philip J. "Gabriel's Challenge: Slaves and Crime in Late Eighteenth-Century Virginia", Virginia Magazine of History and Biography Volume 90, Issue 3, pp. 283-309, 1982.

Rodriguez, Junius P., ed. Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006.

Sidbury, James. Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel's Virginia, 1730-1810. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

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(1776 - October 10, 1800), today commonly known as Gabriel Prosser, was a literate enslaved blacksmith who planned a large slave rebellion in the Richmond area in the summer of 1800. Information regarding the revolt was leaked prior to its execution, and he and twenty-five followers were taken captive and hanged in punishment.

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He was one of the most extraordinary human beings the world has
ever known. Born into the family of a Boston candle maker, Benjamin
Franklin became the most famous American of his time. He helped
found a new nation and defined the American character. Writer,
inventor, diplomat, businessman, musician, scientist, humorist,
civic leader, international celebrity . . . genius.
Explore the life of a remarkable man.

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He was one of the most extraordinary human beings the world has ever known. Born into the family of a Boston candle maker, Benjamin Franklin became the most famous American of his time. He helped found a new nation and defined the American character. Writer, inventor, diplomat, businessman, musician, scientist, humorist, civic leader, international celebrity .

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Early view on slavery

Like most citizens of his time Benjamin Franklin owned slaves and viewed them as inferior to white Europeans, as it was believed they could not be educated. His newspaper the Pennsylvania Gazette advertised the sale of slaves and frequently published notices of runaways. However, he also published antislavery ads from Quakers.

Franklin owned slaves from as early as 1735 until 1781. The Franklin household had six slaves; Peter, his wife Jemima and their son Othello, George, John and King.

After 1758 Franklin gradually changed his mind when his friend Samuel Johnson brought him to one of Dr. Bray's schools for black children. Dr. Bray Associates was a philanthropic association affiliated to the Church of England. In 1759 he joined the association by donating money.

Abolition Society

In 1759 he met Anthony Benezet who started a school in Philadelphia and who later co-founded the Abolition Society. In 1763 Franklin wrote that African shortcomings and ignorance were not inherently natural but come from lack of education, slavery and negative environments. He also wrote that he saw no difference in learning between African and white children.

In 1787 Franklin became the President of the Philadelphia Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, often referred as the Abolition Society. The Society was formed by a group of abolitionist Quakers and Anthony Benezet in 1774. The Abolition Society was the first in America and served as inspiration for the formation of abolitionist societies in other colonies. The group focused not only in abolishing slavery but also in education, moral instruction and employment.

In Address to the Public, a letter dated November 9 th, 1789, Franklin wrote wholeheartedly against the institution of slavery. He argued that slaves have long been treated as brute animals beneath the standard of human species. Franklin asked for resources and donations to help freed slaves adjust to society by giving them education, moral instruction and suitable employment.

On February 3 rd, 1790, less than three months before his death, Franklin petitioned Congress to provide the means to bring slavery to an end. When the petition was introduced to the House and the Senate it was immediately rejected by pro-slavery congressmen mostly from the southern states. A committee was selected to study the petition further and on March 5, 1790 it claimed that the Constitution restrained Congress from prohibiting the emancipation and trade of slaves. Slaves and slavery were indirectly mentioned in the 1787 Constitution. By this time Franklin's health was fragile and on April 17 he passed away at age 84. It was on January 1st, 1863, during the President Abraham Lincoln's administration, that the Emancipation Proclamation was signed giving freedom to about 3 million slaves.

=> Read about Crispus Attucks, the first American hero of the American Revolution

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Early view on slavery Like most citizens of his time Benjamin Franklin owned slaves and viewed them as inferior to white Europeans, as it was believed they could not be educated. His newspaper the Pennsylvania Gazette advertised the sale of slaves and frequently published notices of runaways.

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Thomas Jefferson & His Democracy: Crash Course US History #10

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Benjamin Franklin & anti-slavery petitions to Congress

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Benjamin Franklin & anti-slavery petitions to Congress

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During his life, Franklin had many careers including service as a diplomat, a printer, a writer, an inventor, a scientist, a lawmaker, and a postmaster, among others. In his later years he became vocal as an abolitionist and in 1787 began to serve as President of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. The Society was originally formed April 14, 1775, in Philadelphia, as The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage; it was reorganized in 1784 and again in 1787, and then incorporated by the state of Pennsylvania in 1789. The Society not only advocated the abolition of slavery, but made efforts to integrate freed slaves into American society.

Franklin did not publicly speak out against slavery until very late in his life. As a young man he owned slaves, and he carried advertisements for the sale of slaves in his newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette. At the same time, however, he published numerous Quaker pamphlets against slavery and condemned the practice of slavery in his private correspondence. It was after the ratification of the United States Constitution that he became an outspoken opponent of slavery. In 1789 he wrote and published several essays supporting the abolition of slavery and his last public act was to send to Congress a petition on behalf of the Society asking for the abolition of slavery and an end to the slave trade. The petition, signed on February 3, 1790, asked the first Congress, then meeting in New York City, to "devise means for removing the Inconsistency from the Character of the American People," and to "promote mercy and justice toward this distressed Race."

The petition was introduced to the House on February 12 and to the Senate on February 15, 1790. It was immediately denounced by pro-slavery congressmen and sparked a heated debate in both the House and the Senate. The Senate took no action on the petition, and the House referred it to a select committee for further consideration. The committee reported on March 5, 1790 claiming that the Constitution restrains Congress from prohibiting the importation or emancipation of slaves until 1808 and then tabled the petition. On April 17, 1790, just two months later, Franklin died in Philadelphia at the age of 84.
More Featured Documents

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Benjamin Franklin's Anti-Slavery Petitions to Congress

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En Español During his life, Franklin had many careers including service as a diplomat, a printer, a writer, an inventor, a scientist, a lawmaker, and a postmaster, among others. In his later years he became vocal as an abolitionist and in 1787 began to serve as President of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery.

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Franklin and the Vexing Question of Race in America

by Dr. Emma Lapsansky-Werner, Haverford College
Emeritus Professor of History
Emeritus Curator of the Quaker Collection.

Benjamin Franklin: probably no American child over the age of 10 doesn't recognize his name. We all know he was an American hero from "some time in the past," and in 2005, several museums around the world celebrated his life in an exhibition titled Benjamin Franklin: In Search of a Better World. In 2018, the legendary Franklin would have celebrated his 312th birthday. Of what use is such an old legend? What can Franklin-a slaveholder-turned-abolitionist-teach us today?

The only one of the Founding Fathers to sign the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution, the long-lived Franklin was multifaceted: innovator, philosopher, entrepreneur, statesman, public intellectual, and-at the end of his life-an anti-slavery advocate. A man ahead-of-his-times, his limitless ingenuity fueled a seemingly limitless spectrum of "modernizations:" the concept of a lightning rod; improvements to the wood-burning stove; the magic of bi-focal glasses. Franklin was among the first to advocate the "time-driven" workday, focused around laboring for a preset period of time, as opposed to the "task-driven" workday, which allowed a worker to quit whenever assigned jobs were completed.

And surely, part of Franklin's enduring legacies result from his commitment to "democracy" and "community," including helping to conceive a postal service, a lending library, a hospital for the poor, a fellowship for "promoting useful knowledge," a university, and a widely-publicized cartoon urging the squabbling American colonies to "join or die."

But the publisher/inventor/writer was also a man of his times, struggling to grasp how past notions of "community" should inform the "community" of the future. One vexing aspect of the community-of-the-future was defining the role and rights of "Others" in the new society: women, immigrants, Native Americans, and-especially-African Americans and/or slaves. Such issues bedeviled Franklin and his fellow Constitution-framers.

In many facets of his life and work Franklin-himself a slaveholder-repeatedly bumped up against the conundrum of race, and like most men of his age and status, he lacked templates for shaping answers. But unlike many of his peers, the pragmatic Franklin wrestled with the vexing questions, often reaching ambiguous-even contradictory-answers.

In the last decade of his life, Franklin served as president of an abolition organization, but his progress to that role is murky and inconsistent. As of the 1750s, he showed himself to be suspicious of many "Others:" disparaging "low women," Catholics, and Jews; decrying "alien" German immigrants who would "swarm into our settlements;" and labeling Native Americans as "drunken "savages who delight in war. take pride in murder," and should be pursued with "large, strong, and fierce dogs." Yet, in the 1760s, when white Americans attacked an Indian settlement, he labeled the attack "white savagery." African Americans, he described as "sullen, malicious, revengeful" and "by nature [thieves.]" Yet, ever the inquiring scientist, he visited a school for black children, emerging from the visit with a "higher opinion of the black race than I had ever before entertained," and conceding that slaves' tendency to thievery might be attributed more to their situation than to "nature." But he framed his concern for "poor Negro slaves who are . . . sick or lame" only in the context of the burden they placed upon their owners. Late in his life, he ordered that his slaves should be freed - partly out of his concern that slaves and servants made their owners lazy and unambitious. But for all this inconsistency of thought, Franklin consistently showed himself to be thoughtful, open, teachable.

Franklin scholar Lorraine Pangle described Franklin as "the founder who has the most to teach us today, both about the art of living and about restoring civility to our public sphere." Indeed, Franklin consistently kept his eye on what he believed were the loftiest goals of justice and integrity. But Franklin was a man of his times, and some of the context of his times may seem ill-informed and convoluted in today's times. Though modern Americans are often suspicious of "heroes," Franklin can remind us that though "heroes" can be inconsistent and imperfect, they can inspire us toward the possibility of reaching for our own "better selves," even if-in Robert Browning's words-"our reach exceeds our grasp." Always "In Search of a Better World," Franklin was enigmatic, but he was a man of inquiring intellect, broad vision, and a dogged commitment to "justice," "democracy," and "community"-as best he could probe and understand these elusive principles. Indeed, his life and his struggles have much to inform modern America's pursuit of these same elusive principles.

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Ben Franklin and the Vexing Question of Race in America

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by Dr. Emma Lapsansky-Werner, Haverford College Emeritus Professor of History Emeritus Curator of the Quaker Collection. Benjamin Franklin: probably no American child over the age of 10 doesn't recognize his name. We all know he was an American hero from "some time in the past," and in 2005, several museums around the world celebrated his life in an exhibition titled Benjamin Franklin: In Search of a Better World.

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It's a Wednesday night at a bookstore in a well-off part of Washington, D.C., and every seat is taken. More than 100 people spill into the aisles or crowd the stacks past the philosophy and cookbook sections to hear Ibram X. Kendi talk about the racist ideas that founded the nation. About how racial progress is always followed by new and more sophisticated racist progress. And, especially, about the deeply held beliefs that most Americans, including black people and liberal whites, woke up with this morning that they don't even know are racist and wrong.

For instance, "Black neighborhoods are not more dangerous than white neighborhoods and neither are black people," Kendi tells the crowd. Layers of racist ideas account for why we think so.

Last year, the 35-year-old scholar became the youngest person to win the National Book Award for nonfiction in 30 years for Stamped from the Beginning, The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.

And this year, his moment continues. He's just moved to Washington, where he is launching the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University next week. He's a historian of racism at a time when our public conversation is fixed on it, when successive presidents have triggered the tribal apprehensions of our Mason-Dixon lines, and when the threat of shoot-you-down, run-you-over racial violence feels as close at hand as the peril to the republic from fake facts and revisionist history. This convergence of circumstances keeps him perpetually on book tour.

With the breadth of his scholarship and expanse of his reach, Kendi has been compared to the famed late historian John Hope Franklin, except he wears his locs long and his edges laid. He used to fantasize about a career in the NBA - or, at the very least, on SportsCenter. He'll hit you back on Twitter.

Just so you know, black people are not inherently better athletes than white people, Kendi says. We only think so because "black people have not only been rendered inferior to white people, they've been rendered like animals," and thus physically superior creatures. It's an old racist idea that helped justify African-Americans' suitability for backbreaking labor and medical experiments and the theft of their children. "When we embrace this as part of our identity," Kendi says, "we don't understand." He wants to correct our misunderstandings.

Education, love and exemplary black people will not deliver America from racism, Kendi says. Racist ideas grow out of discriminatory policies, he argues, not the other way around. And if his new center can help identify and dismantle those policies in the U.S. and around the world, he believes we can start to eliminate racism. At least that's the goal.

As the evening wears on in the crowded bookstore, people line up at microphones to question, challenge or offer up hosannas to this young scholar, who, in many ways, is just getting started.

Kendi apologizes for the spare office space he shares with a colleague inside American University's School of International Service. The walls are bare, and his name has not yet made it outside the door. He's still unpacking from the move to D.C. with his wife, Sadiqa, a pediatric emergency room physician at Children's National Health Center, and their 1-year-old daughter, Imani. It's an ambitiously busy life.

Besides being the founding director of the research center, he's teaching history and international relations as part of a joint appointment that brought him from the University of Florida, where he was a professor of African-American history.

He's learning the city, and working on priorities for the center - part think tank, policy shop and incubator for anti-racism strategies - which formally launches next fall. It joins dozens of other customized centers of racial research. One of the earliest and most notable, the W.E.B Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard University, rose to prominence under the leadership of Henry Louis Gates Jr. This year, "year zero," is to raise funds and recruit researchers, faculty and students.

The goal is to identify inequalities, identify the policies that create and maintain those inequalities, and propose correctives in six areas: criminal justice, education, economics, health, environment and politics. Kendi also hopes to create an online library of anti-racist thinking. He's still considering initial projects.

But when he talks about racism, he is not still puzzling out his ideas. Kendi has spent thousands of hours reading thousands of documents, including "some of the most horrific things that have ever been said about black people," to uncover the origins of racist thought. His words are distilled, precise, authoritative. His voice never rises. He is, temperamentally, an antidote to the heat of the subject matter and the hyperbole of the times.

"We have been taught that ignorance and hate lead to racist ideas, lead to racist policies," Kendi said. "If the fundamental problem is ignorance and hate, then your solutions are going to be focused on education, and love and persuasion. But of course [ Stamped from the Beginning] shows that the actual foundation of racism is not ignorance and hate, but self-interest, particularly economic and political and cultural." Self-interest drives racist policies that benefit that self-interest. When the policies are challenged because they produce inequalities, racist ideas spring up to justify those policies. Hate flows freely from there.
The self-interest: The Portuguese had to justify their pioneering slave trade of African people before the pope. The racist idea: Africans are barbarians. If we remove them from Africa and enslave them, they could be civilized.
"We can understand this very simply with slavery. I'm enslaving people because I want to make money. Abolitionists are resisting me, so I'm going to convince Americans that these people should be enslaved because they're black, and then people will start believing those ideas: that these people are so barbaric, that they need to be enslaved, or that they are so childlike that they need to be enslaved."

Kendi boils racist ideas down to an irreducible core: Any idea that suggests one racial group is superior or inferior to another group in any way is a racist idea, he says, and there are two types. Segregationist ideas contend racial groups are created unequal. Assimilationist ideas, as Kendi defines them, argue that both discrimination and problematic black people are to blame for inequalities.

"The actual foundation of racism is not ignorance and hate, but self-interest."

Americans who don't carry tiki torches react viscerally to segregationist ideas like those on display at the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left one young counter-protester dead. Assimilationist ideas are more subtle, seductive and coded.

"You can be someone who has no intention to be racist," who believes in and fights for equality, "but because you're conditioned in a world that is racist and a country that is structured in anti-black racism, you yourself can perpetuate those ideas," says Kendi. No matter what color you are.

Anti-racist ideas hold that racial groups are equal. That the only thing inferior about black people is their opportunities. "The only thing wrong with black people is that we think there is something wrong with black people," a line that Kendi uses like a mantra.

The Blue Lives Matter ( the problem is violent black people) Black Lives Matter ( the problem is the criminal justice system, poor training and police bias) and All Lives Matter ( the problem is police and black people) arguments are extensions of the same, three-way debate (segregationist, anti-racist and assimilationist) that Americans have been having since the founding of the country.

"We've been taught American history as a steady march of racial progress," but it's always been a dual march of racial and racist progress, which we see from Charlottesville to "their Trump Tower," Kendi says.

This is the jump-off Kendi uses to frame the most roiling issues of the day. But before he could build that frame, he first had to deal with his own racism.

Kendi was born Ibram H. Rogers in Jamaica, Queens, New York, to parents who'd been student activists and were inspired by black liberation theology. He grew up playing basketball and still is an ardent New York Knicks fan.

The family moved to Manassas, Virginia, where Kendi attended Stonewall Jackson High School (named for the Confederate general) and dreamed of a career on the hardwood. The slim, 6-foot-1 former guard says he specialized in the no-look pass. "I consider the beautiful pass the most beautiful part of the game of basketball," he says.

Sweet passing aside, his basketball aspirations were irrevocably dashed his sophomore year when he failed to make the junior varsity team. "I was so crushed," Kendi says.

He studied journalism at Florida A&M University and initially wanted to be a broadcaster or a sportswriter. But after internships at The Mobile Register and The Atlanta Journal Constitution, he began to shift his career focus. He wound up getting a doctorate in African-American studies from Temple University. His first book, on the black student protest movement in the '60s and '70s, was published in 2012. He began researching Stamped from the Beginning the following year.

That's when he started to re-examine some of his most deeply held beliefs about race. "I was born into a world of racist ideas, many of which I had consumed myself," says Kendi. "I had to come to grips with ... some of the things that I imagined and thought," about black people "and one of the first and most obvious ones was the idea that black neighborhoods are more dangerous than white neighborhoods, which is a very popular idea."

The highest instances of violent crime correspond with high unemployment and poverty, and that holds true across racial lines, Kendi found. Most white poverty, unemployment and thus violent crimes occur in rural areas, while for blacks those ills are more concentrated in densely populated urban neighborhoods. If impoverished white communities "had five times more people, then that community would have five times, presumably, more violent crime."

"I was born into a world of racist ideas, many of which I had consumed myself."

Another racist idea: "I believed that black children were achieving at a lower level than white children. And I believed in the existence of an achievement gap," says Kendi. Standardized tests prioritize reading and writing as measures of verbal proficiency, as opposed to the wider ability to articulate. And they test subject areas where black schools are vastly underresourced.

"I certainly am somebody who advocates equalizing the resources of school and creating a situation in which we actually live up to our pronouncements that we live in a meritorious society," says Kendi. "But even if these schools persist in being resourced unequally, that doesn't necessarily mean that the students in the schools with lesser resources are intellectually inferior to the students with better resources." He reaches into history to illustrate his point: Just because slaves' lives were circumscribed, they faced more adversity and they dealt with more violence, that doesn't mean enslaved people were inferior to people who were free.

A "more lighthearted area" he had to confront was his ideas about dating black women. "Black women were angry, they didn't know what they want, they're difficult," he'd heard. "And from my standpoint, those are some of the things that I said when I was having some difficulties in dating." When we have negative experiences with individuals, "we often say there's a problem with that black group," without realizing those are racist ideas.

Now, he's a poster child for black love. He and his telegenic wife met on Match.com and debuted their new last name Kendi ("loved one" in the Kenyan language of Meru) at their 2013 wedding in Jamaica, which was featured in Essence magazine.

Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of African and African-American studies at Duke University, calls Kendi part of a vanguard of young black historians, which includes Treva Lindsey at Ohio State and Brittney Cooper of Rutgers, who are transforming the field. Part of what makes him right for the moment is his ability to speak to millennials, who have access to lots of information but can't always decipher what is good or bad. "What he has written is an accessible history of black folks," said Neal. In terms of a book for general readers "that covers such a wide historical period, the only thing I can think about in terms of comparison is John Hope Franklin's From Slavery to Freedom."

Kendi's book resonates like the 2015 National Book Award winner, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, said Neal. "Ta-Nehisi's was kind of an emotional analysis of what this moment is. Kendi's was to bring that kind of energy, except to do it in a historical context. I think it's important to be able to talk about the history of these racist ideas, the impact they've had on black people and black life."

With regard to the most front-and-center issue in sports today, athletes and activism, Kendi says it's important to remember that the athlete/activists of the 1960s - Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown and Tommie Smith - all spoke out in the context of the Black Power movement, which is "precisely what's happening now" with Colin Kaepernick and others who were inspired by Black Lives Matter. "We look for athletes to generate movements, when historically athletes have been good at being athletes, which is precisely what they should be good at, and we should be looking to activists to generate movements." There will then be those athletes who use their platforms to support those movements and ideologies.

Kendi says that while the numbers of black players on the fields, courts and arenas have increased dramatically over the past 50 years, it's been harder to make shifts at other positions.

"We should determine diversity in sports, just like outside of sports, not by the transient players but by the people who are permanent, like the owners, like the coaches, like the sports writers, like the executives." If those groups "are lily-white, then [a sport] is simply not diverse."

This kind of analysis gives Kendi cachet beyond the ivory tower and makes him popular with students, Neal said. Young people see Kendi with his locs and his ability to communicate in a vernacular they know and that expands their thinking about the possibilities for their own lives. They'll say, "This is somebody I can imagine being somewhere down the line," said Neal.

"We should determine diversity in sports, just like outside of sports, not by the transient players but by the people who are permanent, like the owners, like the coaches, like the sportswriters, like the executives."

Peter Starr, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at American University and one of those responsible for bringing Kendi to the university, cites Washington as an organic place to do anti-racist work. "To make real lasting change, change that lasts beyond changes of administrations and flips from one party to the next, you really need to reach out to people who are making more fundamental policy on the ground, in the agencies and throughout the government," he said.

Starr calls Kendi's vision to use researchers from around the country an approach that mirrors what happens in the sciences. "He's got a very expansive vision of the center, and we really think this is a center that's not just the usual, relatively small, one-person shop," he said.

He calls Stamped from the Beginning the kind of book scholars write in their 50s and 60s. But Kendi's impact will transcend the written words, Starr said. Especially since America has struggled with racist incidents recently.

In May, bananas were found hanging from nooses at three locations on the American University campus. This followed racist social media messages and a banana thrown into a black student's dorm in the past few years.

For students of color and "all students, being able to look to someone like Ibram Kendi, who is a model of intelligent scholarship and activism informed by deep contextual and historical understanding," is powerful, said Starr. He's got "a fire to make a difference in the world that I'm not sure I've ever seen in another scholar, frankly."

At the bookstore, the questions, and disquisitions posing as questions, continue as the crowd grapples with, or pushes back against, Kendi's ideas about race and America.

"I think that the issue is that the Africans and the Europeans really can't mix," one person steps to the mic to say.

Across the room, another questioner says, "Gentiles are underrepresented on Wall Street. White males are underrepresented in the NBA. At what point does the assimilation shift into something where other factors come into play?"

"All right now, tell it like it is," says E. Veronica Pace, a genealogist who steps to the microphone and identifies herself as a student of Howard University sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. She asks about the book's title, which was taken from a speech in which Confederate President Jefferson Davis called racial inequality "stamped from the beginning."

Finally, the talk is over and people form a line that stretches toward the door to have him sign their books. "If we are all mindful about this and put our hearts and souls into it, we can turn this ship around," says James Kilgore, whose wife is in the line. He's says he's waiting to see what Kendi is going to do.

For starters, he's working on another book, a memoir entitled How to be An Anti-Racist. "Racist ideas become almost like a drug. Once you hear them and become hooked, you need more in order to sustain the way you see the world, right?" Kendi says. "I was hooked for a long time," and now "I'm trying to relieve other people."

And he's focused on launching the center he'd like to help change the world. The former sports reporter reaches for a metaphor. It's a rare moment where his equanimity seems to falter, just for a bit, perhaps from the weight of the task at hand. "I'm on the court and I've suited up. Now the game is about to start and I have to be ready to perform," Kendi says. "And to win."

Lonnae O'Neal is a senior writer at Andscape. She's an author, a former columnist, has a rack of kids and she writes bird by bird.

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Ibram Kendi, one of the nation's leading scholars of racism, says education and love are not the answer

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It's a Wednesday night at a bookstore in a well-off part of Washington, D.C., and every seat is taken. More than 100 people spill into the aisles or crowd the stacks past the philosophy and cookbook sections to hear Ibram X. Kendi talk about the racist ideas that founded the nation.