Showing results by author "Gary L. Williams" in All Categories

Two hundred and fifty years ago, victory in the American Revolution empowered its founding fathers to consider a glorious ‘revolutionary idea’: a democracy of inclusiveness and diversity for all. Yet, America’s revolution never meant to include the enslaved, who lived in small, dark squares of windowless slave houses. At Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s Constitutional Convention of 1787, compromises perpetuated America’s ‘slave society’ based on free labour, benefiting its citizenry to the detriment of America’s slave row.

In A Soldier Dies to Live, Collins Herrington was such a man who “gave himself the bullet that he didn’t get in the war and found himself lying horizontally across a vertical stream”–his final crossing point. You shall discover whether Collins dies in order to live.

Imagine you were at the American Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. You were among the delegates who shaped the founding document of a new nation. You were also among the few who knew the harsh reality of slavery, the system that provided free labor for many of the wealthy planters and merchants in attendance. You saw the contradiction between the ideals of liberty and equality and the practice of owning human beings as property.