Interesting!
I’ve never heard of her, so I did a bit of searching and found this:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/phillis-wheatley
Thanks for posting your comment!
I had a chance to have a conversation with CL Bryant last year about this time and he convinced me to look forward to black history month.
He says conservatives both black and white should seize our rightful place in black history and show that there is so much more than simple Hollywood slavery.
Calvin Coolidge isn’t known as a great civil rights fighter because he didn’t give blacks free stuff but he was solid when it came to standing up for equal rights for blacks at a time when the progressive klan was at their most powerful.
Salem Poor was a former slave who fought in the battle of Bunker hill and received a congressional commendation on the recommendation of more than a dozen officers. Poor had bought his freedom for 27 pounds which was a year’s pay for any free man. The fact that poor was able to earn the 27 pounds tells me that his owner allowed Salem to do work for himself on the side.
James Armistead Lafayette was a slave who went to fight for Washington and ended up as a double agent under the Marquis de Lafayette. He ended up in the British camps spying on both Benedict Arnold and Cornwallis as well as feeding them false information.
Armistead fell through a legal loophole that didn’t allow him to be freed after the wall because he was a spy and not a soldier. When George Washington died the Marquis de Lafayette found him and went to congress and asked that he be freed and he was. Armistead went on to become a farmer and even owned a few slaves himself.