would you call that a choice for harriet jacobs? >> i think it was a moment of relative choice more so then other situations in her life, but nothing was really good or free. she had to make a tough decision. prof. silber: so it was not a wide-open choice there? >> yeah. >> i think choice kind of implies that she is free, so i don't think that is a choice at all. prof. silber: right. >> that is not a choice of freedom. she was not free when she made that choice. prof. silber: right. so the decision that she made was sort of saved by the fact that she was a slave, in other words. and here is this thing that i read later which i thought was so interesting. this is another story that i was reading about harriet jacobs's's situation and it gave me some very interesting insight about this. she said norcom's threats and harriet's distress notified dr. sands to her sexual availability. he began at this point with courting her with letters and said that the and she was caught between two older stockers and she gave into the younger evil. so

and then that is a kind of cut away of the crawlspace were harriet jacob would have stayed. this is i think harriet s split,ntioned norcom' and she is in the crawlspace at this point, but this is the comaway notice that nor placed. it is assigned by james norcom. it says north carolina, i think it says 1835 on that. when she got out of there, she became very active and abolition, she traveled around were activeomen who abolitionists, the encouraged her to write her story as a narrative. she finished writing it in 1858. it is not a novel, sometimes people call all of these kinds of books novels. she did not have a publisher until she met one of her white abolitionist friends. gave her an endorsement. "well,s this idea that, you write so well, how could you have written so well if you were a slave?" it was published then in 1851 on the eve of the civil war. it is one of the few, not the only, and not even the first, but one of the few slave narratives that was written by a woman. most of the ones of that we are familiar with that we have come across that are published are narra

from the slave narratives of harriet jacobs to ida b. wells to gertrude perkins, african-american women described and denounced their sexual misuse, deploying their voices as weapons in the wars against white supremacy. but for every woman that spoke out, there were undoubtedly many more who kept these brutal attacks to themselves. and silence could be a useful strategy. especially when whites used racist violence and sexual abuse to shore up white supremacy. for example, african-american leaders embraced the politics of respectability and adhered to a culture of silence as a matter of political necessity during the brutal white backlash unleashed from the 1954 supreme court decision outlawing segregation in public schools. for many supporters of segregation, integration always meant miscegenation, or as mississippi judge and founder of the white citizens council tom brady put it, amalgamation. headlines in the citizens council newspaper warned whites that the incubus was coming. mixed marriage, sex orgies, and accounts of black men rapi