Early Life and Enslavement: Leonard Black was born into slavery in Maryland. He details his early life, highlighting the harsh conditions and the brutal realities of being enslaved. His narrative includes descriptions of the physical and psychological torment inflicted on enslaved individuals.Family Separation: One of the poignant aspects of Black’s narrative is his account of family separation, a common and devastating experience for many enslaved people. He reflects on the pain of being ...

It is my object to give to the reader a plain, simple narrative of the more interesting portion of my life, while in slavery. I was born in Annarundel County, State of Maryland, about sixty miles below Baltimore, and lived a slave more than twenty years. My old master was a physician, but I think it prudent to withhold his name. No one, who has always enjoyed the right of liberty, can realize the horrors of slavery. To be at the will of another, to be owned like a cow or horse, and liable ...

Born in Chains—Collected Slave Narratives assembles a capacious archive of bondage, flight, resistance, emancipation, and memory. Spanning autobiography, dictated testimony, spiritual reflection, political argument, and documentary recollection, the volume reveals the formal range of slave narrative traditions across the Atlantic world. Accounts of escape, family separation, literacy, labor, violence, and self-emancipation stand beside meditations on religion, citizenship, and the unfinish...

Leonard Black was a slave who escaped after twenty years of captivity. He eventually became a Baptist minister. The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black is his biography.

Born a Slave: Anthology gathers a wide-ranging archive of testimony on enslavement, resistance, flight, family separation, literacy, religion, labor, and emancipation. Its selections move among autobiography, dictated narrative, spiritual reflection, political address, recollection, and abolitionist-inflected life writing, revealing both the formal variety and evidentiary force of Black testimony. Accounts of escape, self-emancipation, and the struggle to reclaim kinship stand beside narra...