Publishers and more

I went and looked up about the publishers of the slave narratives and it seems like many were not actually published as books, but just written originally and word spread. One of my sources stated that there were nearly 6,000 slave narratives but only 65 appeared as books or pamphlets. It also talked about many got theirs out by using the abolitionist periodicals which in a way is what we talked about. The publishers of these periodicals have a “duty by law” to report runaway slaves and by publishing their narratives and acknowledging the fact that they are runaways, as bad as it seems, they are just as guilty as the slaves for running in my opinion. Even now, during the 21^st century, harboring a fugitive is against the law and punishable in the court of law. It also stated that many slaves would go to anti-slavery meetings and try and sell their stories to the masses. I also found nothing on the punishment of these publishers. The source is Publishers Bindings Online and the URL is http://bindings.lib.ua.edu/gallery/slave_narratives.html

I also wanted to quote something I heard last night on the television, and it really fit in to what we were talking about with the Trepegnier book. Some of you may have heard it before:

“White men can’t jump was a great movie, but what if I made a movie black man can’t swim?”