Role Of Abolitionism In Uncle Tom's Cabin

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Abolitionism challenged barriers to racial equality and free speech. Blacks played a key role during this time in society. Over half of the Liberator's readers were blacks that were attracted to Garrison's stance against colonization and the demand for equal rights. Many of the American Anti-Slavery Society leaders were black. A fugitive slave by the name Frederick Douglass became a well known, major organizer and speaker of this society. Several fugitive slaves published their slave experience, these became powerful ways to get the reality of slavery across to northern readers. One famous novel, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852, was Uncle Tom's Cabin. This story was based on one slave's life and it sold more than 1 million copies …show more content…

It was also the first to center the attention on equal rights for all blacks. However, this movement was unable to stay clear of racism in a country dominated by the white man. By the 1840s, black abolitionists were so fed up with white control that they began to hold their own black conventions. Nonetheless, black and white abolitionists did create political and legal campaigns against racial discrimination in the northern states of America. They had few triumphs, such as putting an end to school segregation in Massachusetts. Black abolitionists wanted whites to see blacks as equal and fellow human beings, they also made the people who thought white supremacy was a good thing look like complete idiots when they countered them in intellectual arguments. The greatest speech about American freedom and American slavery was presented by Frederick Douglass in 1852, in Rochester, New York. He conveyed that to a slave, the celebration of the Fourth of July proves how hypocritical we are as a nation. We declare our commitment to liberty and yet everyday we perform “practices more shocking and bloody” than any other nation. Also, Douglass claimed it to be the Revolution's “rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence.” Douglass believed that if America abolished slavery, it would be able to revive its plan to spread freedom and