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Frederick Douglass Impact On Society

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The life of Fredrick Douglass would be one many dread, his life consisting of mass oppression, brutal beatings, as well as discrimination; as a true representation of the evils within slavery, Douglass´s narrative causes people to reflect and pursue reform for slaves. Douglass´s first experience of evil within his forced labor began when his slave owner, who always treated him well, sold his labor to another plantation for one year owned by Mr.Covey. His first six months included worse conditions on a mass scale in comparison to his original home as a slave. The ideology Covey pursed of work till exhaustion pushed Douglass to such a negitive state of health which led to him collapsing. When Covery was informed of this matter, he preceeded …show more content…

These actions or approaches of Mr.Covey within modern day life today wouldn’t occur given a similar circumstance. Due to the development of social rights as well as a conscience within our nation, this ideology of a conscience towards minorities sparks from situations such as Fredrick Douglass’s being displayed to the public, causing people to actually view the hardships and oppressions slaves faced first hand. This inevitably enabled people within our nation to further the abolitionist movement due to the exposure of helpless people being beaten and killed for something they couldn´t control. Allowing people to view the abuse of power within slavery as well as the lack of humanity or heart for people under slavery. Causing everyday people to veiw what their life would endure if they put they put themselves into the life of a slave. People of our nation growing a conscience and experiencing empathy towards the matter, all due to a story like Fredrick Douglass’s, fueling the fire for the abolitionist …show more content…

All of Douglass’s life, he endured discrimination, oppression, as well as many other evil attributes intertwined within slavery. In his conquest for survival, he was shunned away and told to return to the one who caused his mass oppression, while he was seeking the slightest amount of sympathy and regard for his condition. He returned to this treacherous instance caused by slavery, where he then endured mass beatings and torture for his pursuit of basic needs for his means of self survival. This oppression he faced caused Douglass to turn a leaf mentally, to stand up and fight for his rights of

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359 Words | 2 Pages

Douglas spent a year with Covey, during which he was frequently and brutally whipped. Having spent considerable time in the city, Douglass was not familiar with farm instruments and techniques. Because of this unfamiliarity, he made mistakes and was continually punished. Covey pushed his slaves to the limit, making them work long

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1216 Words | 5 Pages

His beatings and lack of food were only part of his miserable daily life. Eventually Douglass was able to successfully escape this life and vowed to forever actively support the equality of all

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266 Words | 2 Pages

In America in the 1800’s slaves were not allowed to be educated and were broken so that they wouldn’t have hope to escape to the north. Slaves were separated from their mothers at birth and would be taken to another plantation to be put into slavery. They would also be sent to cruel masters who would break them and make them hopeless and more compliant. But Douglass was different; his intelligence, observation, and motivation defined and impacted him. Douglass’s experiences and attributes allowed for him to escape from slavery.

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1275 Words | 6 Pages

In Douglass’s journey, he was sold from the Auld family to another plantation where he was supposed to learn how to act as a slave. Covey, his new master was known for being a harsh man. Covey kept a reputation that he was a slave breaker, if any slave who wouldn’t listen to their masters were sent here. (Douglass, 67-70) Covey would work them to near death and beat them if they disobeyed.

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595 Words | 3 Pages

Elie Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928 in the city called Sighet in Transylvania, which is presently a part of Romania. He had three sisters, two older and one younger, and a father and mother. His two older sisters are Hilda and Beatrice, and his younger is Tzipora. Elie and his family were very religious jews. Their life was busy with their jewish studies and owning a shop that provides for their needs.

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1281 Words | 6 Pages

Covey, a man who was renowned for breaking in young slaves, Douglass was subject to some of the most intensive work and brutalizing punishments. This inhumane method of working slaves was in Mr. Covey’s eyes, justified and was how things were supposed to be. From this, Frederick Douglass grew to despise how slave owners would justify their actions and consider them morally correct. Douglass describes the exhausting effect that Mr. Covey’s work had on him, “My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!” (Douglas 55).

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526 Words | 3 Pages

The Narrative of Frederick Douglass is a very great perspective for people of today to understand what it was like to be a slave in the 1800’s. It tells the story of the slave Frederick Douglass and how he began as an uneducated slave and was moved around from many different types of owners, cruel or nice, and how his and other slaves presences changed the owners, and also how he educated himself and realized that he shouldn’t be treated so poorly It was at the point later in the book that I realized how some slaves might have felt during slavery in the 1800’s. When Douglass is sent away to Mr.Covey he is treated pretty badly but eventually he stands up to Mr.Covey and demands that he stopped being treated like an animal.

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722 Words | 3 Pages

At the age of six, Douglass began his life as a bought slave. His slave owner was most likely his father and his mother died when he was about ten but other than that he lived a relatively normal life for a slave at that time. That is, until he saw his aunt being brutally whipped by his slave owner. This is where Douglass's strong drive to end slavery ensued. Being treated so inhumanly sent Douglass to seek freedom.

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1080 Words | 5 Pages

In “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”, Douglass narrates in detail the oppressions he went through as a slave before winning his freedom. In the narrative, Douglass gives a picture about the humiliation, brutality, and pain that slaves go through. We can evidently see that Douglass does not want to describe only his life, but he uses his personal experiences and life story as a tool to rise against slavery. He uses his personal life story to argue against common myths that were used to justify the act of slavery. Douglass invalidated common justification for slavery like religion, economic argument and color with his life story through his experiences torture, separation, and illiteracy, and he urged for the end of slavery.

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668 Words | 3 Pages

The harsh treatment in which he had to endure dehumanized him and his people. His life as a captive left him no choice over his aspirations, he also lacked the right to choose his ethics. Mr. Covey the unjust slave keeper denied him of his rights and stripped him of the right of sleeping like a human. “I had no bed”(Douglass **).Treated like a savage beast was what he was forced to endure.

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629 Words | 3 Pages

This was the start of what came throughout the beginning of his life. As he continued his journey as a slave he had more horrific experiences that are intended to breakdown the slaves mentally and physically. One main example that Frederick Douglass used to show the negative effects of slavery on people were with Mrs. Sophia Auld and her change in attitude towards Douglass before and after her inception into the world of slavery. When Douglass first is sent to Baltimore to work for the family of Hugh and Sophia Auld, he is wildly excited and impressed at how well they both treated him. Neither of them had ever owned any slaves and treated him way better than he had ever been treated before.

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1110 Words | 5 Pages

Douglass points to the vast unwillingness from the group of whites that refuses to fully perceive and accept African-Americans as deserving and equal citizens of the nation. Based on his personal experiences as a slave, Douglass is abundantly aware that the battle to abolish slavery is not an easy task. For the first twenty years of his life, he witnessed firsthand the abject cruelty of that institution in our country. Tactfully, Douglass seizes this opportunity to publicly highlight the unmerited and coarse differences in the treatment between the whites as opposed to the blacks living in the United States during this time period. He makes a “powerful testaments to the hypocrisy, bigotry and inhumanity of slavery” (Bunch 1).

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793 Words | 4 Pages

Douglass stated, “What am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow-men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters?” He successfully expresses his pain and anger in this quote by providing images of his and his people’s suffering. He tapped into the emotions of his audience, such as mothers, workers, and those who have felt physically pain by exposing them to the amplified struggles he and others had to face. Nonetheless, he continually reminded the audience, both explicitly and subliminally, that his group of people are too human, and that the only difference they share is the color of their skin. He is pleading his cases and hoping that it gets across to his audience in hope they will do the right

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985 Words | 4 Pages

Covey, and this stage is called “naively egoistic orientation.” Kohlberg writes that this person does things, “ ... based on what satisfies one’s own need first… you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”(1). No matter what the truth is, keeping face is always more important to someone in this stage. Douglass, after winning the fight with Mr. Covey, states, “He only can understand the deep satisfaction which I experienced, who has himself repelled by force the bloody hand of slavery”(82).

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392 Words | 2 Pages

Douglass encountered multiple harsh realities of being enslaved. For example, the ex-slave was practically starved to death by his masters on multiple occasions. In fact, “[He was] allowed less than a half of a bushel of corn-meal per week, and very little else... It was not enough for [him] to subsist upon... A great many times [he had] been nearly perishing with hunger” (pg 31).

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