GENESIS 16
Genesis 16
1Now Sarai Abram's wife bare him no children: and she had an handmaid, an Egyptian, whose name was Hagar.
2And Sarai said unto Abram, Behold now, the LORD hath restrained me from bearing: I pray thee, go in unto my maid; it may be that I may obtain children by her. And Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai.
3And Sarai Abram's wife took Hagar her maid the Egyptian, after Abram had dwelt ten years in the land of Canaan, and gave her to her husband Abram to be his wife.
4And he went in unto Hagar, and she conceived: and when she saw that she had conceived, her mistress was despised in her eyes.
5And Sarai said unto Abram, My wrong be upon thee: I have given my maid into thy bosom; and when she saw that she had conceived, I was despised in her eyes: the LORD judge between me and thee.
6But Abram said unto Sarai, Behold, thy maid is in thine hand; do to her as it pleaseth thee. And when Sarai dealt hardly with her, she fled from her face.
7And the angel of the LORD found her by a fountain of water in the wilderness, by the fountain in the way to Shur.
8And he said, Hagar, Sarai's maid, whence camest thou? and whither wilt thou go? And she said, I flee from the face of my mistress Sarai.
9And the angel of the LORD said unto her, Return to thy mistress, and submit thyself under her hands.
10And the angel of the LORD said unto her, I will multiply thy seed exceedingly, that it shall not be numbered for multitude.
11And the angel of the LORD said unto her, Behold, thou art with child and shalt bear a son, and shalt call his name Ishmael; because the LORD hath heard thy affliction.
12And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.
13And she called the name of the LORD that spake unto her, Thou God seest me: for she said, Have I also here looked after him that seeth me?
14Wherefore the well was called Beerlahairoi; behold, it is between Kadesh and Bered.
15And Hagar bare Abram a son: and Abram called his son's name, which Hagar bare, Ishmael.
16And Abram was fourscore and six years old, when Hagar bare Ishmael to Abram.
Paramour rights
The term paramour rights refers to the American practice of a white man taking a black woman to whom he was not married as his concubine. The term "paramour rights" was first used by Zora Neale Hurston. The practice began prior to the Civil War and was reinforced afterward by anti-miscegenation laws, which prohibited interracial marriage between whites and non-whites. Hurston first wrote about the practice in her anthropological studies of the turpentine camps of North Florida in the 1930s. She believed that the death knell of paramour rights was sounded by the trial of Ruby McCollum, a black woman who murdered her white lover, Dr. C. Leroy Adams, in Live Oak, Florida, in 1952. McCollum's trial was covered by Hurston for the Pittsburgh Courier.
In 1934 the Federal Emergency Relief Administration began to collect the testimony of ex-slaves in the Ohio River Valley and in the lower South. In 1936 the Works Progress Administration took charge of the project and broadened it to all of the Southern states as well as Indiana, Kansas, and Oklahoma.
One elderly ex-slave, whose name was not given, had this to say about her white father: "Well, you know, Uncle Stephen, he kinda overseer for some widow womans. He mama' husband. He come to see my mama any time he gits ready. But I find out he ain't my pappy. I knowed that since I's a little thing.
"I used to go over to Massa Daniels' plantation. They tell me all 'bout it. The folks over there they used to say to me: 'Who's your pappy? Who's your pappy?' I just say: 'Turkey buzzard lay me and the sun hatch me,' and then go on 'bout my business. Course all the time they knows and I knows, too, that Massa Daniels was my pappy" (B.A. Botkin, editor, "Lay my Burden Down," University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1958).
During slavery times African American slave women were considered to be very worthy of having babies. In fact, most white men, even Northerners and foreigners thought that Black women were so worthy as willing mothers that a foreign visitor, Johann Schoepf, wrote that "in almost every house there are negresses, slaves, who count it an honor to bring a mulatto into the world." Even the abolitionist James Redpath wrote that mulatto women were gratified by the criminal advances of Saxons (Deborah Gray White, "Ar'n't I a Woman?" W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1987).
'Morally repugnant': Alabama issues apology for its treatment of black woman gang raped by six white men in 1944
Last updated at 3:57 PM on 30th March 2011
A black woman who was brutally gang raped by six white men almost 70 years ago has received an apology from the state for its failure to prosecute her attackers.
The Alabama House unanimously passed a resolution to express its 'deepest sympathies and solemn regrets' to Recy Taylor, who is now 91.
Mrs Taylor, a 24-year-old married mother, was kidnapped at gunpoint as she walked home from church in Abbeville in 1944.
