Dr. Kimberly Britton's latest book, The Slave Within, revolves around the different kinds of systems, which have been controlling humans. A type of modern slavery, where humans are unable to question their surroundings and expected to follows blindly. In her book, Britton also discusses the history of slavery in America and how it has impacted just not the Black community, but also the rest of the American population. The history of slavery in America is a long and brutal one. Slavery began when a ship with 20 captives first landed in Point Comfort in Virginia 1619. While, in most history books the first slave ship is considered to the Mayflower, which brought 102 Africans to America in 1620. The first slaves had arrived in America 150 years before the land became the United States of America. Slavery lasts for four centuries or 400 years before it was completely abolished. But that did not mark the end of the mistreatment of Black Americans. Decades later Black Americans were still facing racism, systematic oppression, and segregation. As per The Guardian, here is a short timeline of slavery in America.
· 1619
After the first captives were forced on to Virginia’s shores by a Dutchman in 1619, the majority of the country remained white and relied mainly on the labor of Native American slaves and white European indentured servants. It was not until the end of the 17th century that the transatlantic slave trade made its impact on the American colonies.
· 1661
The first anti-miscegenation statute – prohibiting marriage between races – was written into law in Maryland in 1661, shortly after enslaved people were brought to the colonies. By the 1960s, 21 states, most of them in the south, still had those laws in place. Alabama was the last state to repeal the ban on interracial marriage, in 2000.
· 1776
The Declaration of Independence, which embraced in its first lines “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights”, did not extend that right to slaves, Africans or African Americans, with the final version scrapping a reference to the denunciation of slavery. Thomas Jefferson, a slaveowner himself, penned those lines rejecting slavery; he removed the reference after receiving criticism from a number of delegates who enslaved black people. This could represent “the fabric of the American political economy” ever since, some historians have said.
Slavery flourished initially in the tobacco fields of Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina. In the tobacco-producing areas of those states, slaves constituted more than 50% of the population by 1776. Slavery then spread to the rice plantations further south. In South Carolina, African Americans remained a majority into the 20th century, according to census data.
· 1860
The British-operated slave trade across the Atlantic was one of the biggest businesses of the 18th century. Approximately 600,000 of 10 million African slaves made their way into the American colonies before the slave trade – not slavery – was banned by Congress in 1808. By 1860, though, the US recorded nearly 4 million enslaved black people – 13% of the population – in the country as the American-born population grew.
· 1865
According to Abraham Lincoln, the civil war was fought to keep America whole, and not for the abolition of slavery – at least initially. Southern states said they wanted to secede to protect states’ rights, but they were really fighting to keep people enslaved. Lincoln took on the fight for the freedom of slaves, some historians have suggested, because he was worried the British would support the south in its self-declared self-determination and recognize the south as a separate entity. If he had made the war about ending slavery, it would have looked bad for the south’s fight and the British supporting its cause. Lincoln’s death was probably the first casualty of “a long civil rights movement that is not yet over”, the historian Peter Kolchin has suggested.
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