This story brought up so many points of interest I almost don't know where to begin when writing about it. Overall I liked the very personal touch it put on everything that was happening during that time period. Each of the characters, no matter how small, whether black or white, represented very well the fragmentation that slavery caused. I was really able to see how much this issue divided this country and how far its harmful effects spread. The whole time reading it I kept thinking about how to this day we are still dealing with these effects. I know that things are much better than they were but there is still a huge portion of our society that looks first at an individuals skin color to shape their opinion about them. For all the legal changes that have been made I sometimes wonder just how far exactly we have come as a society in regards to the social aspect.
On page 334 Captain Sybil states "We have been slow to see our danger and to do our duty. Our delay has cost us thousands of lives and millions of dollars." This made me think how slow this whole process has been. This country was founded in 1776 on the platform of freedom yet it took almost 100 years for the slaves to be freed and almost another 100 years for them to be granted civil rights. This seems ludicrous to me! To truly believe in what this country and the Constitution stand for one has to believe in its principles being put into place immediately for all its citizens.
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Good point, Jefferson. In "Letter from Birmingham Jail,"Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. says that he was advised to "delay" working for civil rights because "the time was not right," something that Harper was hearing all those years before.
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