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Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.
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“Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.”

Phillis Wheatley

Source
On Being Brought from Africa to America
Date
1773
Meaning

Meaning of “Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, May be…”

Wheatley turns Christian doctrine back toward readers who demean Black people, insisting within the poem’s religious framework that racial contempt is incompatible with shared spiritual possibility.

Source context

Where does it come from?

“On Being Brought from Africa to America,” in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), represented by Project Gutenberg #409. The poem’s eighteenth-century racial and Christian vocabulary is preserved in historical context; interpretation remains attentive to Wheatley’s position as an enslaved Black poet writing for a colonial audience.

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EqualityHumanityShortThought-Provoking Quotes That Invite ReflectionDignityReligionRights
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“The rank is but the guinea’s stamp, The man’s the gowd for a’ that.”

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Harper argues that injustice against a vulnerable group damages the moral and civic life of the whole society rather than remaining isolated to its immediate victims.

Source details

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This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.
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“This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.”

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Douglass exposes the exclusion within a national celebration of liberty when enslaved people are denied the freedom and rights being publicly commemorated.

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Source details

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