How does Anthony Johnson’s story deepen your understanding of the “universe of obligation?”

Explanation:

beginnings of slavery. The goal is not to reteach this history, since your class has likely already studied these topics. Rather, the goal of this lesson is to review pieces of this earlier history to deepen students’ understanding of race and to introduce an important concept, universe of obligation. Scholar Helen Fein defines universe of obligation as the circle of individuals and groups toward whom obligations are owed, to whom rules apply, and whose injuries call for amends. In this unit, we extend Fein’s concept and suggest that both nations and individuals can have a universe of obligation. In either case, it consists of those an individual or a society believes are worthy of respect and protection. The story of Anthony Johnson provides students with an opportunity to reflect on how a society’s universe of obligation is defined. Johnson was an African-born resident of Virginia in the seventeenth century who arrived in the New World as an indentured servant. Like many other indentured servants, both white and black, he won his freedom. But unlike many newly freed servants, he became a prominent landowner. during Johnson’s lifetime, Virginia’s attitudes and laws regarding race and slavery changed. Shortly after his death, slavery became a permanent condition reserved for people with dark skin. By studying Johnson’s story, students can trace the change in Virginia’s universe of obligation and see the origins of not only the belief in the existence of different races but also the claim that one race is superior to another. Students will see the seeds of race and racism planted in seventeenth-century Virginia come to fruition in the reading “Are All Men created equal?” (included here as an extension). This reading quotes Alexander Stephens’s “corner-Stone Speech,” delivered on the eve of the civil War, in which the confederate vice president argues that white supremacy is the foundation of Southern society and the new confederate government. Also quoted in this lesson is a Georgia newspaper editor asserting, in 1865, that because the white and black races are “like different coins at mint,” no amount of legislation or education can make them equal. This is a belief and worldview that proved hard to change throughout the Reconstruction era. This lesson, and the history that follows in this unit, underscores the fact that in the United States, race has perhaps been t

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