Solomon Northup's memoir tells this quite unusual story of the kidnapping of a free Northern African-American and his enslavement in the Deep South in Louisiana - on two, three different kinds of plantations.

On what makes the memoir 12 Years a Slave unique And if you go back to this story, it's not always going to please you, but it's a story you have to work through to find your way to something more redemptive. It's a problem in our culture because, to be quite blunt about it, most Americans want their history to be essentially progressive and triumphal, they want it to be a pleasing story. On why it's important for Americans to remember this history He says the movie does an excellent job of depicting 'just how much slaves were utterly commodities, physical commodities in the slave trade.' He's currently writing a biography of Frederick Douglass, who after escaping slavery, wrote perhaps the most famous and important of all slave memoirs and became an influential abolitionist.īlight joins Gross to explain where this memoir fits into the genre of slave narratives, and to review the accuracy of the film. His 2007 book, A Slave No More, includes the recently discovered narratives of two former slaves. 'We need to keep telling this story because it, in part, made us who we were,' Blight tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.īlight is the director of the Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University.

Northup was a free black man who was kidnapped into slavery in 1841 and won his freedom 12 years later. But 'we're not so fond of being the country that had the biggest slave system on the planet.' That's why Blight was glad to see the new film 12 Years a Slave, an adaptation of an 1853 memoir by Solomon Northup.

'We love being the country that freed the slaves,' says historian David Blight. The film 12 Years a Slave is an adaptation of Northup's 1853 memoir. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Solomon Northup, a free black man in upstate New York who was kidnapped into slavery in 1841 and won his freedom 12 years later.

Northup 12 years a slave