Frederick
Douglass
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Frederick Douglass: Robert E.
Hayden3
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When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this
beautiful
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and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
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usable as earth; when it belongs at least to our children,
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when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
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reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
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than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians;
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this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
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beaten to his knees, exiled, visionizing a world
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where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
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this man, superb in love and logic, this man
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shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric,
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not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze along,
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but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
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fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing. (Dark
Symphony Negro Literature in America, Emanuel and Gross, p 485)
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John Brown: "He could not
stand to hear the word slavery. . .Talk. John Brown was tired of talk he
was on his way to the gallows. With him was Dangerfield Newby, forty-four,
Newby was a free Negro who had a wife and seven children in slavery about
thirty miles from Harpers Ferry. At a secret meeting in stone quarry near
Chambersburg, Pa., John Brown tried to recruit Frederick Douglass to for
his Virginia raid, August 20 ( attempt to attack, abolish slavery). Douglass
advised Brown that the raid was ill-advised. John Brown attacked Harpers
Ferry, V., with 13 white men and five Negroes, Oct16-17. Of the five Negroes,
two were killed, two were captured, and one escaped." Before the Mayflower,
Leon Bennett, Jr., pp 144, 146-147, 157-158}
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Toussaint L'Ouverture
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"Before Toussaint L' Ouverture, the history of Haiti,
could be summed up in one word: slavery. . .As the revouion in France gained
momentum, the far away island of Saint domingue became increasingly restless.
. .August 9,1789 . . . French territory reverberated to the rhythm of hundreds
of drums. Toussaint collected his forces and joined the Spaniards to war
against the French army. . .Emperor Napoleon held a very low opinion of
the black former rulers of the colony. " Toussaint L' Ouverture, et
al. loom like a triple peaked mountain in the history of Haiti. La
Citadel stands today as a monument to those champions of freedom."(John
W. Vandercook, Black Majesty, New York)
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