Colson Whitehead Quotes
Being a slave meant never having the stability of knowing your family would be together as many years as God designed it to be. It meant you could come back from picking cotton in a field to find that your children are gone, your husband's gone, your mother's gone. It meant knowing you are property that could be sold to the highest bidder, of value only to continue to support the plantation economy.
Whitehead, Colson. Interview by Terry Gross. Fresh Air, NPR, 8 Aug. 2016.
In the brutal history of slavery there were very few instances of any degree of minimal humanity by slave states. This is one.
The Mormons were in Missouri at the time. Phelps was warning the church members essentially not to get involved with the slavery issue. The Mormon Church tended to support the institution of slavery at that time although Mormons themselves did not own slaves. However, we should remember that the Mormons themselves were a very persecuted group and Phelps and other Church leaders probably didn’t want their members alienating the non Mormons more than they already did by their existence. This was very similar to the Roman Catholic Church leaders at the time. The Catholics were also a persecuted minority and the Catholic Bishops often supported slavery—especially in the South to try and avoid hostility from the power structure and the majority. Some individual Mormons and individual Catholics were much opposed to slavery. See {629158} and {629154} for more on the Mormons and slavery. Later, Smith altered his early view.
In the Jim Crow era and well into the 20th century, many school books and historians, wanting to minimize the enmity between North and South, tended to a historical revisionism where the real brutal and immoral edge of slavery was minimized and slave owners were depicted as being in error by modern standards but well-meaning and paternalistic. Foner, with this famous quotation, put the lie to the false image of paternalistic slavery. By the beginning of the 21st century, there were very few serious historians who still tried to characterize slavery in the South as “paternalistic” otherwise humane. See {584014} for another of Foner’s famous quotes regarding slavery
Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead is an American novelist. He is the author of seven novels, including his 1999 debut work, The Intuitionist, and The Underground Railroad (2016), for which he won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again in 2020 for The Nickel Boys. He has also published two books of non-fiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship ("Genius Grant").
