Black diamonds gathered in the darkey homes of the South
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- Publication date
- 1860
- Publisher
- New York : Pudney & Russell
- Collection
- umass_amherst_libraries; blc; americana
- Contributor
- UMass Amherst Libraries
- Language
- English
First published under title: The Southern spy: or, Curiosities of Negro slaveryin the South. Washington, 1859. Reprinted, New York, 1859 under title: Black diamonds
Sabin 63853
Sabin 63853
- Addeddate
- 2009-02-05 16:16:45
- Call number
- 3744137
- Camera
- Canon 5D
- External-identifier
- urn:oclc:record:1041636110
- Foldoutcount
- 0
- Identifier
- blackdiamondsgat1860poll
- Identifier-ark
- ark:/13960/t5p84kz83
- Lccn
- 11011713
- Ocr_converted
- abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.37
- Ocr_module_version
- 0.0.21
- Openlibrary_edition
- OL23281851M
- Openlibrary_work
- OL3637823W
- Page_number_confidence
- 100
- Page_number_module_version
- 1.0.3
- Pages
- 166
- Possible copyright status
- NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT
- Ppi
- 500
- Scandate
- 20090209173423
- Scanfactors
- 1
- Scanner
- scribe10.boston.archive.org
- Scanningcenter
- boston
- Worldcat (source edition)
- 4618300
- Full catalog record
- MARCXML
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Reviews
Reviewer:
mcmpe04
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favoritefavoritefavoritefavorite -
November 13, 2020
Subject: To Face America
Subject: To Face America
A must-read for White Southerners who question the truthfulness of what we were taught. This collection of Pollard's letters is an apologia for Negro slavery. For Pollard, slavery brought Christianity to the Negro; it represented the future of economic prosperity for the South; it raised the America Negro to a level of civilization far above that of African Blacks; and it reflected the natural laws and hierarchy of White masters and Negro slaves.
If you can finish this book without re-examining what your were taught growing up in the South, you're a hard case.
The first two years of my elementary education in small town South Alabama I attended a Whites-only segregated school. When the federal courts enforced desegregation in 1969, Black and White schools were integrated. I graduated from an integrated high school in a small farming town in south Georgia, which was 60:40 Black to White, in part because of the Whites-only private school that was created in reaction to the courts' orders.
I was raised on the propaganda that Whites provided well for Negoes, that Christianity was the salvation of the Negroes' eternal soul but that segregation in churches was normal, that America was a haven compared to Africa, that Whites were the superior race, that the South was a victim of prejudiced Northerners and foreigners, and that the Civil War was really about so much more than slavery.
Crawling out from underneath this S__T has taken decades, and I'm still not free of it nor will I ever be. I have been privileged and my share of life's hard knocks has been disproportionately minor compared to those experienced by billions of other people. Yet I complain like a spoiled child.
My memory is fixed on the old freckle-faced Black man who used to walk about town—and it was a small Georgia town—as freely and with as little inhibition as the next man, despite the fact that growing out of his left eye socket was an enormous sausage-like growth of tissue that hung down as far as his nose. He was out and about day after day, year after year while I was in high school working afternoons and Saturdays in a local grocery store he frequented, his growth an indictment of a community that had completely lost touch with normalcy. Most hid behind the excuse that he refused to have surgery. I won't believe that. What did I do ... nothing more than the next White guy.
The authenticity of this book shocks me at what I see in myself. My faith in Christianity and American democracy had long been shaken to its foundations, I thought, but the inhuman of American slavery followed by what a South African pointed out to me in 1980 was American apartheid is still wreaking havoc with the childish American ideals of religion, freedom, capitalism, and Enlightenment. All I have now is the notion that we—human beings, the most mendacious creatures in our known part of existence—can best proceed as Otto's sailors at sea, constantly rebuilding our leaky ship as we're tossed about by the wind and the waves.
If you can finish this book without re-examining what your were taught growing up in the South, you're a hard case.
The first two years of my elementary education in small town South Alabama I attended a Whites-only segregated school. When the federal courts enforced desegregation in 1969, Black and White schools were integrated. I graduated from an integrated high school in a small farming town in south Georgia, which was 60:40 Black to White, in part because of the Whites-only private school that was created in reaction to the courts' orders.
I was raised on the propaganda that Whites provided well for Negoes, that Christianity was the salvation of the Negroes' eternal soul but that segregation in churches was normal, that America was a haven compared to Africa, that Whites were the superior race, that the South was a victim of prejudiced Northerners and foreigners, and that the Civil War was really about so much more than slavery.
Crawling out from underneath this S__T has taken decades, and I'm still not free of it nor will I ever be. I have been privileged and my share of life's hard knocks has been disproportionately minor compared to those experienced by billions of other people. Yet I complain like a spoiled child.
My memory is fixed on the old freckle-faced Black man who used to walk about town—and it was a small Georgia town—as freely and with as little inhibition as the next man, despite the fact that growing out of his left eye socket was an enormous sausage-like growth of tissue that hung down as far as his nose. He was out and about day after day, year after year while I was in high school working afternoons and Saturdays in a local grocery store he frequented, his growth an indictment of a community that had completely lost touch with normalcy. Most hid behind the excuse that he refused to have surgery. I won't believe that. What did I do ... nothing more than the next White guy.
The authenticity of this book shocks me at what I see in myself. My faith in Christianity and American democracy had long been shaken to its foundations, I thought, but the inhuman of American slavery followed by what a South African pointed out to me in 1980 was American apartheid is still wreaking havoc with the childish American ideals of religion, freedom, capitalism, and Enlightenment. All I have now is the notion that we—human beings, the most mendacious creatures in our known part of existence—can best proceed as Otto's sailors at sea, constantly rebuilding our leaky ship as we're tossed about by the wind and the waves.
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