Manisha Sinha

I may not have been the right audience for this book dedicated to arguing that abolitionism wasn’t a white movement, but rather constantly influenced and guided by African-American voices, and otherwise more open to appeals to women’s rights and worker’s rights than it has sometimes been portrayed. (I'm not the right audience because I'm not embedded in that literature.) Sinha makes the case that self-emancipation—escape from slavery—produced some of the most influential voices on behalf of enslaved people. I also did learn this wonderful line from Frederick Douglass: “What O’Connell said of the history of Ireland may with greater truth be said of the negro’s. It may be ‘traced like a wounded man through a crowd, by the blood.’” (I hear Douglass is doing great things recently.)… (mais)