The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

by Jemar Tisby

Olaudah Equiano published an autobiography in 1789 called The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa to record his life as a slave and eventually a free man. He was born around 1745 as part of the Igbo tribe in modern-day Nigeria, and slave traders kidnapped Equiano and his sister when he was about eleven years old.8 Years later Equiano wrote about the traumatic experience of being packed into a slave ship as a piece of cargo. In one particularly stomach-churning recollection, Equiano described the heat, smell, and human waste that accompanied slaves as they languished below deck. “The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time.” He continued, “This produced copious perspirations, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves of which many died.” Finally, he told of the tubs which held human excrement “into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated.”9