Quiz

Quiz 1 – AASP 201 – Summer 2020

Your name _____________________________________

Answer all the questions ON this test.  Be sure to answer all the questions.  I take off for spelling and grammar errors.  The end of the test is marked “END OF QUIZ 1.”  Submit to Assignment Folder as an MS Word document There are 6 parts to the test, and all but the first one requires reading and analyzing texts.  Please give yourself the time to do well.

Item 1 – Please put the correct letter answer after the question (20 points)

1. About how many slaves were exported from Africa to the New World between 1500 and 1880? _____

 

1. 50 million   25 million               c.  12 million               d.  8 million

 

2. About how many slaves were imported directly to N. American colonies? ____

 

1. 388,000                  630,000                  c.  1 million                 d. we don’t know

 

3. What were Europeans looking for when they first ventured on sea-faring voyages of discovery to the New World?   ______

 

1. Cotton    Gold    c.  Freedom from oppression    d.  Licorice

 

4. Which of the following crops/products did NOT typically use the work of enslaved people?       _____

 

1. Sugar          Tobacco      c.  Lace making       d.    Rice

 

5. When were African slaves first taken to South America and the Caribbean? _____

 

1. Around 1450   Around 1510    c.   Around 1590    d.  Around 1630

 

6. When were African slaves first taken to North America? _____

 

1. 1492    1551     c.  1619      d.  1705

 

7. What invention led to the Second Middle Passage? ____

 

1. steam engines         cotton gin               c.  canals                      d.  photography

 

8. What percentage of people of African descent living in the United States were NOT slaves prior to the Civil War?  ___

 

1. 1-2%                       3-5%                       c.  10-13%                   d.  15-18%

 

9. Which formerly enslaved person prepared a brief narrative of his life as a slave, and described many instances when he defied his owner’s rules about staying at home, and even engaged in a physical battle with him?    ___________

 

1. Frederick Douglass
2. Robert Smalls
3. Martin Delany
4. William Green

 

10. Prior to 1850, what rights did free black men have in the United States? __________

 

1. They could vote, buy and sell goods, and travel as they wished
2. Black men could vote in all of the Northern “free” states.
3. Each state set up different laws, often forbidding them to travel, own a business or vote
4. Free blacks were permitted to get an education throughout the United States

 

 

Item 2 – 20 points

From this version of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,  http://www.gutenberg.org/files/23/23-h/23-h.htm   –

Please read this section from Chapter 7 and answer the questions about it in two or three sentences:

I was now about twelve years old, and the thought of being a slave for life began to bear heavily upon my heart. Just about this time, I got hold of a book entitled “The Columbian Orator.” Every opportunity I got, I used to read this book. Among much of other interesting matter, I found in it a dialogue between a master and his slave. The slave was represented as having run away from his master three times. The dialogue represented the conversation which took place between them, when the slave was retaken the third time. In this dialogue, the whole argument in behalf of slavery was brought forward by the master, all of which was disposed of by the slave. The slave was made to say some very smart as well as impressive things in reply to his master—things which had the desired though unexpected effect; for the conversation resulted in the voluntary emancipation of the slave on the part of the master. [after describing a section on the emancipation of Catholics, Douglass goes on to write]… The reading of these documents enabled me to utter my thoughts, and to meet the arguments brought forward to sustain slavery; but while they relieved me of one difficulty, they brought on another even more painful than the one of which I was relieved. The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the most wicked of men. As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! that very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out. In moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity.

 

1. What was The Columbian Orator?  When was it first published? (2 points)

 

 

2. From what you know of slavery, how likely was it for a master and slave in the U.S. in 1830 to have a dialogue as described in The Columbian Orator? Explain why or why not. (2 pts)

 

3. Why was “learning to read” more of a “curse rather than a blessing” to Douglass? (4 points)

 

TEST CONTINUES ON NEXT PAGE

 

4. What does the above passage explain about the importance of keeping oppressed people in ignorance of their condition? (4 points)

 

 

From this section of Frederick Douglass’ Narrative in Chapter 6, please answer the questions below:

I had resided but a short time in Baltimore before I observed a marked difference, in the treatment of slaves, from that which I had witnessed in the country. A city slave is almost a freeman, compared with a slave on the plantation. He is much better fed and clothed, and enjoys privileges altogether unknown to the slave on the plantation. There is a vestige of decency, a sense of shame, that does much to curb and check those outbreaks of atrocious cruelty so commonly enacted upon the plantation. He is a desperate slaveholder, who will shock the humanity of his non-slaveholding neighbors with the cries of his lacerated slave. Few are willing to incur the odium attaching to the reputation of being a cruel master; and above all things, they would not be known as not giving a slave enough to eat. Every city slaveholder is anxious to have it known of him, that he feeds his slaves well; and it is due to them to say, that most of them do give their slaves enough to eat.

 

5. What did Douglass understand about the rationale for the behavior of slave owners in the city as opposed to those owners residing in more isolated locations?

 

1. Why were slave owners in the city likely to be kinder to their enslaved people than owners in rural areas? (4 points)

 

1. Why were slave owners in rural areas likely to use force in their treatment of enslaved people without facing disapproval from other rural slave owners? In other words, why was violence an approved method of control over enslaved people in rural areas? (4 points)

 

Item 3 – From Martin R. Delany’s 1852 report, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Chapter 16, “National Disfranchisement of Colored People,” please read the following text and answer the questions (15 points):

The most prominent provisions of the Constitution of the United States, and those which form the fundamental basis of personal security, are they which provide, that every person shall be secure in their person and property: that no person may be deprived of liberty without due process of law, and that for crime or misdemeanor; that there may be no process of law that shall work corruption of blood. By corruption of blood is meant, that process, by which a person is degraded and deprived of rights common to the enfranchised citizen—of the rights of an elector, and of eligibility to the office of a representative, of the people; in a word, that no person nor their posterity, may ever be debased beneath the level of the recognised basis of American citizenship. This debasement and degradation is “corruption of blood”; politically understood—a legal acknowledgement of inferiority of birth . . . The slave is more secure than we; he knows who holds the heel upon his bosom—we know not the wretch who may grasp us by the throat. His master may be a man of some conscientious scruples; ours may be unmerciful. Good or bad, mild or harsh, easy or hard, lenient or severe, saint or satan—whenever that master demands any one of us—even our affectionate wives and darling little children, we must go into slavery—there is no alternative. The will of the man who sits in judgment on our liberty, is the law. To him is given all power to say, whether or not we have a right to enjoy freedom. This is the power over the slave in the South—this is now extended to the North. The will of the man who sits in judgment over us is the law; because it is explicitly provided that the decision of the commissioner shall be final, from which there can be no appeal. The freed man of the South is even more secure than the freeborn of the North; because such persons usually have their records in the slave states, bringing their “papers” with them; and the slaveholders will be faithful to their own acts. The Northern freeman knows no records; he despises the “papers.” Depend upon no promised protection of citizens in any quarter. Their own property and liberty are jeopardised, and they will not sacrifice them for us. This we may not expect them to do . . . . A people capable of originating and sustaining such a law as this, are not the people to whom we are willing to entrust our liberty at discretion. What can we do? What shall we do? This is the great and important question:—Shall we submit to be dragged like brutes before heartless men, and sent into degradation and bondage?—Shall we fly, or shall we resist? Ponder well and reflect.

 

1. When was the 19^th century Fugitive Slave Act Passed? (3 points)

 

2. What does it mean when a person has been degraded by “corruption of blood”? What does that designation do to a person’s rights in the United States?  (3 points)

 

3. Why are enslaved people in a better position than free black people, according to Delany? 34 points)

 

4. How do these thoughts by Delany in 1852 relate to the Black Lives Matter movement, to Colin Kaepernick taking the knee, and the death of George Floyd? (6 points)

 

 

 

Item 4 – From Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s “The Red Record:  Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States,” https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14977/14977-h/14977-h.htm#,  please answer the following questions (15 points):

From Chapter 1:  Beginning with the emancipation of the Negro, the inevitable result of unbridled power exercised for two and a half centuries, by the white man over the Negro, began to show itself in acts of conscienceless outlawry. During the slave regime, the Southern white man owned the Negro body and soul. It was to his interest to dwarf the soul and preserve the body. Vested with unlimited power over his slave, to subject him to any and all kinds of physical punishment, the white man was still restrained from such punishment as tended to injure the slave by abating his physical powers and thereby reducing his financial worth. While slaves were scourged mercilessly, and in countless cases inhumanly treated in other respects, still the white owner rarely permitted his anger to go so far as to take a life, which would entail upon him a loss of several hundred dollars. The slave was rarely killed, he was too valuable; it was easier and quite as effective, for discipline or revenge, to sell him “Down South.” But Emancipation came and the vested interests of the white man in the Negro’s body were lost. The white man had no right to scourge the emancipated Negro, still less has he a right to kill him. But the Southern white people had been educated so long in that school of practice, in which might makes right, that they disdained to draw strict lines of action in dealing with the Negro. In slave times the Negro was kept subservient and submissive by the frequency and severity of the scourging, but, with freedom, a new system of intimidation came into vogue; the Negro was not only whipped and scourged; he was killed. Not all nor nearly all of the murders done by white men, during the past thirty years in the South, have come to light, but the statistics as gathered and preserved by white men, and which have not been questioned, show that during these years more than ten thousand Negroes have been killed in cold blood, without the formality of judicial trial and legal execution. And yet, as evidence of the absolute impunity with which the white man dares to kill a Negro, the same record shows that during all these years, and for all these murders only three white men have been tried, convicted, and executed. As no white man has been lynched for the murder of colored people, these three executions are the only instances of the death penalty being visited upon white men for murdering Negroes.

 

1. In what year was this pamphlet published? (2 points)

 

2. Who wrote the Preface to “The Red Record”? (2 points)

 

3. What distinguishes “lynching” from other forms of social punishment recognized as acceptable by governments? (3 points)

 

4. Why did the end of slavery in 1865 imperil black Americans? (8 points)

 

 

Item 5 (10 points).

Find one primary source about slavery that focuses on the topic of the food enslaved people ate. Cite it in MLA style and quote from it. (3 pts.)

Do the same for one secondary source about food for enslaved people. Cite it in MLA style and quote from it. (3 pts.)

Compare the strengths and weaknesses of the two texts you found about this topic. (4 pts)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Item 6  (20 points) In Chapter 6 of The Future of the American Negro, Booker T. Washington lays out some of the strengths and weaknesses of African Americans   Here is a link to the full book:  http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26507/26507-h/26507-h.htm

Washington describes, with surprising honesty, one significant “weakness”:

But the weakness of the Negro which is most frequently held up to the public gaze is that of his moral character. No one who wants to be honest and at the same time benefit the race will deny that here is where the strengthening is to be done. It has become universally accepted that the family is the foundation, the bulwark, of any race. It should be remembered, sorrowfully withal, that it was the constant tendency of slavery to destroy the family life. All through two hundred and fifty years of slavery, one of the chief objects was to increase the number of slaves; and to this end almost all thought of morality was lost sight of, so that the Negro has had only about thirty years in which to develop a family life; while the Anglo-Saxon race, with which he is constantly being compared, has had thousands of years of training in home life. The Negro felt all through the years of bondage that he was being forcibly and unjustly deprived of the fruits of his labour. Hence he felt that anything he could get from the white man in return for this labour justly belonged to him. Since this was true, we must be patient in trying to teach him a different code of morals.

 

1. In what year was this essay written? (2 pts)

 

2. Why was Booker T. Washington considered an authority on the status of African Americans, 30 years after the slavery had ended? (4 pts)

 

3. *According to Washington, why do black people have lower moral characters – give two reasons (8 points):

 

4. *From 1865 to 1900, what social and economic factors made it hard for black people to have strong families to – in Washington’s opinion – develop ethical and moral behaviors?  (6 pts.)

 

*Use sources from the readings through Week 3 to answer questions 3 & 4 in well-constructed paragraphs (150-200 words).  Cite in MLA style and have a Works Cited list.