Response To Frederick Douglass

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorHigh School, 11th grade November 2001

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After reading "Narrative of The Life of Frederick Douglass" I came up with two ideas that the author is trying to deliver to us. These ideas may not be the main, but they extend the author's point of view and understanding of slavery as a part of his life.

In some parts of his book the author shows that slavery itself degrades personality of everybody, it degrades people who own slaves and it degrades those people who were born slaves. If you were born as a slave, your personality would be degrading day by day for the rest of your life. Slaves couldn't receive education; so they would be uneducable for the rest of their lives. Slave owners would not want his slaves to know that many Americans saw their bondage as a moral outrage. Slave owners kept away slaves from education which would ruin slaves as workers.

Being able to read would help them to understand that they could free and do whatever they wanted to do. During that horrible time for all African-Americans education would help them to learn why how to fight for their rights and freedom. They would shriek for a better world, because for all slaves their world was a plantation where they happened to be born, live and die.

Slave owners were mean people. They did not have respect for other human beings; owing slaves made them very heartless people and it is a sign of degradation. Douglass writes that many slave owners and people who shared their ideas described African-Americans as a negative stereotypes in order to treat them as property that belong to them. People who owned slaves liked to think that they are much superior to black people who would not survive without their owners.

The second point...