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Summary Of The Hanging Of Black Man's Encounter With Liberty

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White supremacists dominate the media today in both violent protests and accusatory remarks against the African American race. Racism regarding people of African descent has existed in this nation since it first began. Though we no longer enslave Africans or force African Americans into separate establishments in society apart from whites, racism is still a serious issue in this great nation that prides itself on being free and equal. In The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah A Free Black Man’s Encounter with Liberty by J. William Harris, this theme of the white man and his contradictions regarding the law and social morals surrounding racism is ever present. In the case of Thomas Jeremiah, a free black man who owns property and slaves of his own is convicted of the crime of conspiring to begin a slave revolt against Charlestown …show more content…

Police brutality against African Americans is common on social media and many officers believed to have committed these acts walk freely with as little as a slap on the wrist so to speak. Thomas Jeremiah, was by general definition of what makes a great Englishman, on equal standings with a white man. He owned property, practiced Christian faith, and was a free man with a great reputation among white and black men alike. Yet, due to the pigmentation in his skin, any court trials in which he was convicted of a crime, he would be tried as a slave and therefore receive the most radical of punishments. The right to a trial by jury is also an American liberty this nation prides itself in. Many argued in Jeremiah’s time that rights such as the trial by jury fell to all men, black or white, while others adamantly refused that black men were considered worthy. These were only a few of the contradictions made by white men in which rights and laws were put in place, but the opposite was silently applied to the black

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