ZInn ch. 9

In Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom, Zinn is talking about slavery and the freedom of blacks in America during the times of the 1800’s. Zinn on the first page in the first couple paragraphs speaks about how the blacks during this time were seen through society’s eyes; he talks about how the people especially the whites saw them and what they thought of them. All of these were cases of people in the south. He describes a way to end slavery by saying, “It would take either a full-scale rebellion or a full-scale war to end such a deeply entrenched system. If a rebellion, it might get out of hand, and turn its ferocity beyond slavery to the most successful system of capitalist enrichment in the world. If a war, those who made the war would organize its consequences. Hence, it was Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves, not John Brown. In 1859, John Brown was hanged, with federal complicity, for attempting to do by small-scale violence what Lincoln would do by large-scale violence several years later---end slavery.” This quote is about how messed up the political system was in the U.S. at this time. The entire country was against the blacks, including the court systems, and the armed forces just to name a few. The system was completely screwed up and as Zinn says the only way to end it was through violence.
The authors argument is not as much about how the system was corrupt, but about how even after all of this was said and done, the blacks still did not receive the freedom and rights that they should have. They were still treated the same. He goes on to talk about the Underground Railroad and they brave men and women who led other blacks to the north. He speaks of a couple of them such as Harriet Tubman, who led the most slaves to the north of out all the black leaders of the railroad. There were other figures who helped get rights for the blacks during there time, people like Nat Turner who was a slave who gathered around 70 of his fellow slaves and went on a “rampage” for plantation to plantation, murdering whoever tried to stop them.
One question that I have would be why did some of the white states, even after the slaves had been freed not accept blacks? Why would they still not let them have the respect they deserved? The answer is because of racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Groups of white people who hated blacks and did not believe that they should have their rights, they believed that they were superior to the blacks.
This was an interesting and informative article to read. I enjoyed reading it because it had a lot of good information, and was kept interesting and was not dull and drug out. It was a lot of previously learned information, but not as in depth as I had learned it before.