"The historian Kenneth Stampp, in his remarkable book “The Peculiar Institution,” has a fascinating section on the psychological indoctrination that was necessary from the master’s point of view to make a good slave. He gathered the material for this section primarily from the manuals and other documents which were produced by slaveowners on the subject of training slaves. Stampp notes five recurring aspects of this training.
First, those who managed the slaves had to maintain strict discipline. One master said, “Unconditional submission is the only footing upon which slavery should be placed.” Another said, “The slave must know that his master is to govern absolutely and he is to obey implicitly, that he is never, for a moment, to exercise either his will or judgement in opposition to a positive order.” Second, the masters felt that they had to implant in the bondsman a consciousness of personal inferiority. This sense of inferiority was deliberately extended to his past. The slaveowners were convinced that in order to control the Negroes, the slaves “had to feel that African ancestry tainted them, that their color was a badge of degradation.” The third step in the training process was to awe the slaves with a sense of the masters’ enormous power. It was necessary, various owners said, “to make then stand in fear.” The fourth aspect was the attempt to “persuade the bondsman to take in an interest in the master’s enterprise and to accept his standards of good conduct.” Thus, the master’s criteria of what was good and true and beautiful were to be accepted unquestionably by the slaves. The final step, according to Stampp’s documents, was “to impress Negroes with their helplessness: to create in them a habit of perfect dependence upon their masters.”
Here, then, was the way to produce a perfect slave. Accustom him to rigid discipline, demand fro him unconditional submission, impress upon him a sense of his innate inferiority, develop in him a paralyzing fear of white men, train him to adopt the master’s code of good behavior, and instill in him a sense of complete dependence."
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Taken from his last book “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?” (1967) (pages 39-40)