For many enslaved African On Slaveholders’ （对于许多奴役非洲奴隶主的）.pdf

National Humanities Center Resource Toolbox The Making of African American Identity: Vol. I, 1500-1865 For many enslaved African On Slaveholders’ Sexual Abuse of Slaves Americans, one of the cruelest hardships they endured was Selections from 19th- 20th-century Slave Narratives sexual abuse by the slave- holders, overseers, and other white men and women whose power to dominate them was complete. Enslaved women were forced to submit to their masters’ sexual advances, perhaps bearing children who would engender the rage of a master’s wife, and from whom they might be separated forever as a result. Masters forcibly paired “good breeders” to produce strong children they could sell at a high price. Resistance brought severe punishment, often death. “I know these facts will seem too awful to relate,” warns former slave William J. Anderson in his 1857 narrative, “. . . as they are some of the real ‘dark deeds of American Slavery.’” th Presented here are selections from two groups of narratives: 19 -century memoirs of fugitive slaves, often published th by abolitionist societies, and the 20 -century interviews of former slaves compiled in the 1930s by the Works