The modern historian Leonard Curry certainly does not exaggerate when he concludes, [N]ot one sentient black in antebellum America could escape the knowledge that he lived in a white land under a white government that administered white law for the benefit of a white population, and in the eyes of all these he was a being inferior to all but the most base and degraded of the whites, and that no amount of conformity to white mores and customs or acceptance of white values could change that reality.18 This reality did more than illustrate northern hypocrisy. It served as a ready justification
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