Source: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Title: Memorials of Gilbert Haven, Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church
Date: 1880 AD
Author: W H Daniels
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“The most beautiful lady we saw abroad, one of the loveliest we ever looked upon, was a brown Bethlehem Jewess, who passed us at the tomb of Rachel, on her donkey, with her brown, bearded, and turbaned lord and lover walking at her side, a perfect type of the Rachel and Jacob of four thousand years before. Just such complexions may one see today in those who were but lately Southern slaves. A very comely and attractive Bedouin, of a bright brown complexion, went up the pyramids with us, and stood under the Sphinx. When asked to come to America, he replied, ‘You will sell me.’ We had been selling multitudes of his complexion for generations. Dean Stanley describes Abraham as a Bedouin sheik. Except in the faith, he says, ‘In every aspect and likeness is complete between t he Bedouin chief of the present day, and the Bedouin chief who came from Chaldea nearly four thousand years ago.’ One of these ‘aspects’ is complexion, and the Arab of Palestine and the Wilderness, is very like Frederick Douglass in this particular. “
Credits
Featured Image: Ansdell, Richard. 1862. https://collections.si.edu/search/record/ark:/65665/fd5fdd405a7a90c46a48cf7dd37419c380d
