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Valentine’s Day on one side is full or happiness, love, and generosity but on the other hand it involves brutality, slavery, and abuse. In a way, Valentine’s Day could be associated with slavery on the basis that the majority of what people buy for the day is bought from countries using slaves, but this day will always be known for love. Born into slavery in 1817 or 1818, Frederick Douglass went on to become one of the most prominently abolitionist leaders of his time. While there is no record of his birth, Douglass chose to celebrate his birthday on 14th February every year as he remembered his mother calling him her ‘little Valentine’ as a child. Roses or chocolates may be fine as gifts for Valentine’s Day this week, but a real gift you can give someone or yourself is to show through action, “I want you to live.” It seems somewhat ironic that Valentine’s Day should fall in the middle of what was much later declared “Black History Month.” Equally ironic is the unconditional “tough love” of Black Americans recorded throughout history, for their family members as well as for the families of their slave masters and their immediate families. Frederick Douglass Born Valentines Day 1817 He was a Black abolitionist, orator, and writer, who escaped slavery and urged other Blacks to do likewise before and during the American Civil War. From Tuckahoe, Maryland, he was the son of a slave. He escaped slavery in 1838 by reaching New Bedford, Massachusetts. On Valentine's Day, there will be no chocolate gifts for young Aly Diabate. News. Taking Child Slavery Out of Valentine’s Day. By Tom Harkin and Eliot L. Engel . Feb. 14, 2005 12 AM PT . February is both Black History Month and gives us Valentine’s Day. Some see it as love month; others as a celebration of Black history and culture. Might it be both? Black History Month was started in 1970 by students at Kent State University. Over the past 50 years, attention to Black History Month has waxed and waned. This Valentine's Day, as millions purchase roses to give to loved ones, International Justice Mission is reminding buyers that there is a darker side to some of our most basic purchases, including roses. On July 11, 2014, IJM and local authorities outside Bangalore, India rescued four boys from slavery on a rose farm. The children, each between In the days leading up to Valentine’s Day, many stores remind us it’s time to shop for gifts for the people we love. In 2014, Freedom United took a stand by exposing how many of these traditional tokens of love may have been made with modern slavery: Chocolate may be tainted with child labor in the cocoa fields of West Africa; By Tom Harkin and Eliot L. Engel Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on labor, health and human services and education. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.) is a member of the House International On Valentines Day–one of the busiest days for sale of roses and chocolate–Global Exchange is working to raise awareness about the state of the world’s cocoa producers which are home to Living in lonely solitude to pay for his bloodstained past, forty-four-year-old Valentino has no connection with others except for once a year at Valentine’s Day, when he unleashes the beast inside and lets himself go wild with a stranger. Valentine's Day is a time to celebrate romance and love and kissy-face fealty. But the ancient Romans had bloodier, drunker and more naked notions to mark the occasion.
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