In 1770, in an attempt to gain support for the Revolutionary War, the government mainly targeted the “men” of the nation, white males, to join the fight against Britain. The Boston Massacre, by Paul Revere, successfully conveyed this message. The Boston Massacre generated a spark of support from settlers in New England by purposely leaving out the black man that got killed during the massacre, Crispus Attucks. Revere did not include Attucks in the picture because the American society did not perceive black people as people. The American society credited a dead black man with just as much as pathos as a living black man. In 1773, Phillis Wheatley spoke out about equal treatment in her poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America”, stating, “Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, May be refin’d and join the angelic train.” Although rationalism pertains to knowledge more than religion, the last bar of Wheatley’s poem provides an overarching statement about man on Earth, where God will receive all of his Christian children with open arms. This, in a religious way, put blacks on the same level as whites but blacks remained less than human in the American society. But the fact that a black woman wrote and performed …show more content…
From 1820 through the 1840s, the Age of Reform had a lot to do with the abolitionist movement in regards to slavery. In 1831, a man named William Lloyd Garrison gave black people a voice in his abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, in which he famously called for America to immediately emancipate the slaves. Although he was not the first person to give a voice to the black population, his efforts in the abolitionist movement hurried the process of putting black people in the limelight. Actions like those made the American society listen and made them think about the way they viewed blacks. In 1945, Frederick Douglass published Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, in which he wrote, “In coming to a fixed determination to run away, we did more than Patrick Henry, when he resolved upon liberty or death. With us it was a doubtful liberty at most, and almost certain death if we failed. For my part, I should prefer death to hopeless bondage” (Douglass 74). This quote, when compared to America during this time period, epitomizes the situation black people faced. How a white man can fight for his right to be free without penalty, but a black man can not even think about doing something like that without an inevitable punishment to follow. But above all of that, the