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Anthology focuses on slavery words

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From: The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Date: 20030119
Author:RENEE TAWA

Anthology focuses on slavery words

By RENEE TAWA Los Angeles Times

Sunday, January 19, 2003

Decades before Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass published their famous works, an anonymous village poet in Cambridge, England, wrote a gravestone inscription for the orphaned 4-year-old daughter of a former slave.

The girl, Anna Maria Vassa, was buried in St. Andrew's churchyard; the children of villagers left "choice flowers" on her grave. She was the daughter of an African man "torn from his native field, ah foul disgrace," the poet lamented in July 1797.

The inscription is included in ...

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