Watch New PBS Series The Abolitionists Online
The PBS series The Abolitionists tells stories from the eyes of Black and White abolitionists including Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Angelina Grimké, Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown. If you thought Django Unchained was real, watch the clip below of Frederick Douglas’ earliest experience with slavery as a 6 year old boy. The realism in the whipping scene is more poignant than the stylized violence in Tarantino’s film.
From the PBS website
The documentary reveals how the movement shaped history by exposing the fatal flaw of a republic founded on liberty for some and bondage for others, setting the nation on a collision course. In the face of personal risks — beatings, imprisonment, even death — abolitionists held fast to their cause, laying the civil rights groundwork for the future and raising weighty constitutional and moral questions that are with us still.
The clip below is from the perspective of Frederick Douglas as a young boy. Douglas’ skills as an orator and writer later in life became prolific, and it was unbelievable that such prose could come from a former slave. “It was the bloodstained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery,” he would later write of what he saw in the clip below.
The currently released episodes are also available online. Click here to visit PBS and watch the full series or watch it below.
