Light Skinned Back Then

William Wells Brown

My fair complexion was a great obstacle to my happiness, both with whites and blacks, in and about the great house. Often mistaken by strangers for a white boy, it annoyed my mistress very much. On one occasion, a visitor came to the place in the absence of the doctor. While Mrs. Young was entertaining the major (for he was a military man), I passed through the room, and going near the stranger, he put out his hand and said to me, "How do you do, bub?" and turning to the lady, he exclaimed, "Madam, I would have known that he was the doctor's son, if I had met him in California, for he is so much like his papa." Mistress ordered me out of the room, and remarked that I was one of the servants, when the major begged pardon for the mistake. After the stranger was gone, I was flogged for his blunder.

Reputation

 James Gordon Bennett, of the New York Herald, in a time of great pecuniary distress, soon after establishing his paper, borrowed three hundred dollars of a black man; and now he is one of our most relentless enemies. Thus it is that those who fattened upon us often turn round and traduce us: Reputation is, indeed, dear to every nation and race; but to us, the colored people of this country, who have so many obstacles to surmount, it is doubly dear:--

                    "Who steals my purse steals trash;
                    'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
                    But he who filches from me my good name,
                    Robs me of that which not enriches him,
                   And makes me poor indeed."

Consciousnesses

 In the Virginia legislature, in the year 1832, Hon. Lewis Summers said,--
        "A slave population exercises the most pernicious influence upon the manners, habits and character of those whom it exists. Lisping infancy learns the vocabulary of abusive epithets, and struts, the embryo tyrant of its little domain. The consciousnesses of superior destiny takes possession of his mind at its earliest dawning, and love of power and rule 'grows with his growth and strengthens with his strength.' Unless enabled to rise above the operation of those powerful causes, he enters the world with miserable notions of self-importance, and under the government of an unbridled temper."

Freedom Summer

"Every white man in this country would be frightened if they thought the black man would take them over!"
-Freedom Summer quote a man said this talking to President Johnson August, 1960's