Celia a slave pdf

The pattern of sexual abuse that would mark their entire relationship began almost immediately. After purchasing Celia in a neighboring county, Newsom raped her on the journey back to his farm. He then established her in a small cabin near his house and visited her regularly most likely with the knowledge of the son and two daughters who lived with him. Over the next five years, Celia bore Newsom two children; meanwhile, she became involved with a slave named George and resolved at his insistence to end the relationship with her master.

When Newsom refused, Celia one night struck him fatally with a club and disposed of his body in her fireplace. Her act quickly discovered, Celia was brought to trial. McLaurin focuses sharply on the role of gender, exploring the degree to which female slaves were sexually exploited, the conditions that often prevented white women from stopping such abuse, and the inability of male slaves to defend slave women.

Setting the case in the context of the s slavery debates, he also probes the manner in which the legal system was used to justify slavery.

By granting slaves certain statutory rights which were usually rendered meaningless by the customary prerogatives of masters , southerners could argue that they observed moral restraint in the operations of their peculiar institution. An important addition to our understanding of the pre-Civil War era, Celia, A Slave is also an intensely compelling narrative of one woman pushed beyond the limits of her endurance by a system that denied her humanity at the most basic level.

Celia was only fourteen years old when she was acquired by John Newsom, an aging. Recounts the story of Celia, a slave in antebellum Missouri who killed her master after five years of sexual abuse at his hands and was later found guilty of murder and hanged.

In , fourteen-year-old Celia became the property of Robert Newsom, a prosperous and respected Missouri farmer. For the next five years, she was cruelly and repeatedly molested by her abusive master--and bore him two children in the process.

But in , driven to the limits of her endurance, Celia fought back. The ninth winner of the Yale Drama Series is a searing and powerful drama of slave litigation, injustice, institutional racism, and the rule of law. Barbara Seyda's stunningly theatrical. Powerful, poetic, and. Books for All Kinds of Readers Read HowYouWant offers the widest selection of on-demand, accessible format editions on the market today. The pattern of sexual abuse that would mark their entire relationship began almost immediately.

After purchasing Celia in a neighboring county, Newsom raped her on the journey back to his farm. He then established her in a small cabin near his house and visited her regularly most likely with the knowledge of the son and two daughters who lived with him.

Over the next five years, Celia bore Newsom two children; meanwhile, she became involved with a slave named George and resolved at his insistence to end the relationship with her master. When Newsom refused, Celia one night struck him fatally with a club and disposed of his body in her fireplace. Her act quickly discovered, Celia was brought to trial. She received a surprisingly vigorous defense from her court-appointed attorneys, who built their case on a state law allowing women the use of deadly force to defend their honor.

Nevertheless, the court upheld the tenets of a white social order that wielded almost total control over the lives of slaves. Celia was found guilty and hanged. Melton A. McLaurin uses Celia's story to reveal the tensions that strained the fabric of antebellum southern society.

Celia's case demonstrates how one master's abuse of power over a single slave forced whites to make moral decisions about the nature of slavery. McLaurin focuses sharply on the role of gender, exploring the degree to which female slaves were sexually exploited, the conditions that often prevented white women from stopping such abuse, and the inability of male slaves to defend slave women.

Setting the case in the context of the s slavery debates, he also probes the manner in which the legal system was used to justify slavery. For the next five years, she was cruelly and repeatedly molested by her abusive master--and bore him two children in the process.

But in , driven to the limits of her endurance, Celia fought back. And at the tender age of eighteen, the desperate and frightened young black woman found herself on trial for Newsom's murder--the defendant in a landmark courtroom battle that threatened to undermine the very foundations of the South's most cherished institution.

Based on court records, correspondences and newspaper accounts past and present, Celia, A Slave is a powerful masterwork of passion and scholarship--a stunning literary achievement that brilliantly illuminates one of the most extraordinary events in the long, dark history of slavery in America. SuperSummary, a modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, offers high-quality study guides for challenging works of literature.

This page guide for "Celia, a Slave" by Melton A. McLaurin includes detailed chapter summaries and analysis covering 8 chapters, as well as several more in-depth sections of expert-written literary analysis.

Featured content includes commentary on major characters, 25 important quotes, essay topics, and key themes like Moral Paradox and Ambiguity and Appearances vs. Reality: The Role of Law in Slavery. Walker took seriously God's expectation that justice be done in righteous ways and that persons respect the humanity and dignity of self and others, fundamental claims of the Hebrew Prophets.

In the tradition of Eric Lott's award-winning Love and Theft, Hartman's new book shows how the violence of captivity and enslavement was embodied in many of the performance practices that grew from, and about, slave culture in antebellum America. Using tools from anthropology and history aswell as literary criticism, she examines a wealth of material, including songs, dance, stories, diaries, narratives, and journals to provide new insights into a range of issues.

She looks particularly at the presentations of slavery and blackness in minstrelsy, melodrama, and the sentimental novel;the disparity between actual slave culture and "managed" plantation amusements; the construction of slave culture in nineteenth-century ethnographic writing; the rhetorical performance of slave law and slave narratives; the dimension of slave performance practice; and the political consciousness offolklore.

Particularly provocative is her analysis of the slave pen and auction block, which transmogrified terror into theatre, and her reading of the rhetoric of seduction in slavery law and legal cases concerning rape. Persuasively showing that the exercise of power is inseparable from itsdisplay, Scenes of Subjection will interest readers involved in a wide range of historical, literary, and cultural studies. Despite the obstacles to equality under law, black Americans have set a determined path to make the words of the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence a reality for themselves and others.

This book is an introduction to race and law in America. It is designed as a tool to the understanding of the role of race in American society through the prism of legal cases brought by and against blacks.

The analysis will include American colonial laws, landmark Supreme Court cases of the 19th and 20th centuries as well as relevant recent decisions. In examining these cases the reader will discern the great impact civil rights cases have had on American society as well as the effect our society has had on the legal system. It will provide the reader with a foundation for present day discourse involving pressing issues of race in American society.

Readers go on a journey from the invasion of Africa into the Colonial period and the Civil Rights Movement. In She Took Justice, we see centuries of courage in the face of racial prejudice and gender oppression. We gain insight into American history through The Black Woman's fight against race laws, especially criminal injustice.

She became an organizer, leader, activist, lawyer, and judge — a fighter in her own advancement. These engaging true stories show that, for most of American history, the law was an enemy to The Black Woman.