Slavery is a very complicated subject with many layers. Perhaps you can concentrate on one aspect of slavery, such as the Middle Passage, which was the journey slaves took from Africa to the New World. This journey was frightening and deadly for many people. You could also concentrate on what life was like for American slaves on plantations. A good source of information is Frederick Douglass's autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. In the beginning chapters, he discusses what it was like to grow up on a plantation where he did not often see his mother and commonly witnessed the beatings of family members. A third idea is to use Frederick Douglass's descriptions (in later chapters of his autobiography) of his life in Baltimore to produce a movie or script about a slave who worked in an urban area. Douglass worked on ships and earned wages, which were given to his masters. In these later chapters, he explains he wanted to read, but his slave mistress, who initially taught him some rudimentary parts of reading, then was not allowed to continue to teach him. People thought teaching slaves to read would ruin them for slavery, as they would develop a mind of their own. This situation renewed Douglass's determination to learn to read. Using Douglass's life could help you develop a story line related to slavery.
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