Today, I finished the book, "The Fearless Benjamin Lay" which I found deeply moving. One hundred years before the full-scale Abolition movement, before the Underground Railroad, Benjamin Lay was a radical activist, a ceaseless goad to the wealthy educated class of his fellow Quakers, who ran the Meetings and owned slaves. He was not for "gradual emancipation" but immediate release of enslaved people. A dwarf with a spinal deformity, he suffered unending persecution yet persevered in his quest, because his soul was straight and his compassion drove him to use his life to fight this horrifying crime against humanity. I will give the book back to the friend who loaned it to me but the memory of the courage and purity of Benjamin Lay will stay with me. The author is Marcus Redicker. This is an amazing book!
The author asks and answers many of the questions I had such as why have we not heard of Benjamin Lay before? And the answers are enlightening and speak to several other interests of mine: Benjamin Lay was a self-educated commoner. Like many reformers, he had worked with his hands and taught himself. He was not the descendant of wealthy merchants educated at fine schools. Benjamin Lay had seen first-hand, as a sailor, many facets of the horrors of the slave trade, especially in Barbados where public torture and murder of enslaved people was common. Also, many of the educated and refined people of the time, people of power and social standing, were slave holders as for example Thomas Jefferson. I have read several books over the many decades, gradually revealing the sexual exploitation of Sally Hemmings and the enslavement of the offspring of this relationship of Jeffersons with this enslaved woman, including the most recent work on the dna proof of her descendants' relationship to Jefferson.
A topic rarely put at the front of the Abolition movement and the struggle is that along with the exploitation for free labor of kidnapped and enslaved people, one of the deep and powerful and abiding motivations for the oppression of enslaved African people was the access it gave men with money to the bodies of women.
Today pornography and prostitution flourish and journalists and educated men of power and social standing make jokes about it as though the exploitation of the disadvantaged is funny and acceptable, as long as they are women. The recent expose' of widespread intimidation of women for perverted sexual gratification shows us where the ongoing battle is taking place.
For people of conscience the two new fronts in the ongoing war between good and evil are in the cruelty towards animals and the sexual exploitation of women. Just as with Benjamin Lay, who was also aware of the issue of animal cruelty and exploitation, those of us who share this consciousness are continually exposed to ridicule for our beliefs that all creatures deserve justice. Just as we live in a world where people blithely pander to their base desires and justify the practice, like Benjamin Lay, those of us who have reached a conscientious awareness of the injustice must bear up and live on in our principles and hope that as with the on-going and successful struggle against enslavement of people in the U.S., the work against the enslavement and exploitation of animals will one day be seen for the wrong that it is and will cease. And the degradation of women for the entertainment of men along with it.
"Do unto others as you would have others do unto you"
(and in that thought an expansion is treat women the way you would want your mothers, sisters, daughters treated)
Happy New Year!
Happy Trails!
Jo Ann
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