Source identified1
Image design Midnight
Read & copy
“Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.”
Meaning & context
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 details
“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.