This movie was really powerful. As I watched the movie, the things that they were saying seemed so unreal to me. I couldn’t believe that some of the things mentioned actually took place in America. As I watched I felt a certain amount of anger rising inside of me. I never realized that African Americans had once been indentured servants. I always thought that blacks only came over as slaves. This only makes the fact that the slaves were promised freedom, then it was taken away worse.

They told stories of a black man who came as an indentured servant and worked his way up until finally he owned a large plantation. The movie never mentioned that there was any type of opposition to him owning land at all. But later on the movie talked about how once the slave ships started coming over the race relations began to go sour. Blacks were suddenly faced with a fear that they would not be able to ever be free. Soon in 1640 there was the first African who was ordered to be a slave for life for trying to run away from his indentured servitude. The whites that ran with him only had there times increased slightly.

It is interesting that the punishment for one man became the rule for an entire culture. I was truly disturbed as I heard of the amount of beatings and punishments that took place as African American men, women and children were taken from the lands into a strange country to be treated as less than human. I couldn’t believe when they talked about how they branded each of the Africans like cattle. They truly believed that they were not human. I don’t know haw anyone could do that to another human being. I am really glad that I watched this movie because it provided me with information that you would not normally hear in school textbooks.

I would definitely like to some how integrate this into my teaching. I think this movie is so powerful. It really makes you think about the American society as a whole. It makes you look at the amount of corruption that took place in Americas first years and wonder how we have come so far since then. I am so glad that I didn’t live in a time when I would have had to watch people be so severely abused and treated like animals. The thought that human could cause so much physical pain to another human startles me. I wonder if anyone from and organized hate group has ever watched a film like this because I bet it would cause them to think twice about the persecution that they place on African Americans.