My Folks Don’t Want Me To Talk About Slavery

4 Pages 978 Words

Perhaps Sarah Debro best explained many people’s views on slavery when she said, “My folks don’t want me to talk about slavery. They’s shame niggers ever was slaves.” Many people today would rather overlook this period in the history of the United States. Most see it as the past, and feel since they aren’t the ones to blame for the enslavement of these people during that time, its bears no importance to them. However it bears a great deal of importance to every single American. This period in history, along with every other period, helped form the United States into the country it is today.
For one to truly understand this period in history, one must not only look to secondary sources of information that are usually provided to students in school, such as textbooks and lectures. One must also look to primary sources of information, such as direct accounts, historical documents, and personal records. Secondary sources can give basic facts and a general idea of what happened. Primary sources can give specific facts, ideas, and even the feelings of those who lived during the period. Through reading people’s actual accounts of what happened at a certain time in history, rather than an account from a person that wasn’t there, it helps to enhance one’s understanding of events. Primary sources can introduce a point of view that perhaps the reader never
thought of. They add to the basic information historians provide through secondary sources.

A secondary source gives basic facts and general ideas. It can give the reader a basic idea of slavery and the conditions, but cannot give the reader a clear idea of the experience of slavery. It can introduce facts, statistics and important dates. Secondary sources can also give the reader important information that a primary source might not supply. For example, in Out of Many, Faragher states the slave population was estimated at 700,000 in 1790, and grew to 4 ...