Muslims were among the first Slave traders, walking the African slaves from West to East. Seafaring nations Portugal,Spain, Holland, France, England, then traded in slaves and transported them to the New Word.
The vast majority of the Salves entering the New World were found in the Caribbean and South America, the sugar cane plantation areas. Aprox. 5% of all the slaves eventually landed in the what is now the United States. The United States as a nation had little to do with the trading and transportation of Slaves from Africa. A student in the United States would never know this being educated in an American schools.
I am amazed that Muslim names are adopted by ethnic groups in the US, El this and Al that, considering that the Muslims were among the most prevalent Slave traders.
The government of France has entered into a contract for the supply of the islands of Guadaloupe and Martinique with ten thousand African immigrants. In the affair of the French immigrant vessel, the Regina Coell, it was declared on trial that, the majority of negroes on board were slaves who had been purchased from the Vey chiefs, and Prince Manna, at a rate of two dollars a head -- half cash and half British goods. They were put on board the French vessel with chains and ropes and thus confined.
I looked up the Vey (or Vye) tribe and found that it was a tribe on the west coast of Africa, apparently in the area of the Gallinas River in or near Sierra Leone and Liberia. Prince Manna lived along the Gallinas River and in an 1845 visit by the British denied selling British subjects as slaves. The Amistad slaves were from the interior but passed through the Gallinas area on the way to the New World.
An account of the Gallinas area written in 1837-38 says the following. [Source: Gallinas slave market].
Gallinas, in the latitude 7° 05' N and longitude 11° 35' W, the notorious slave mart of the Northwest Coast of Africa, is a river whose entrance and interior is not navigable but to boats and small crafts. Four years back, the shores of this shallow river were colonized by Spanish slave dealers who, while they remained undisturbed, accumulated several fortunes.The indigenes of this river, who are called Vye, were not numerous before the establishment of the Spanish [slave] factories, but since 1813 when several ships from Cuba landed their rich cargoes, the neighboring cities flocked to this river, and as there is much similarity in their languages, they soon became naturalized with the aborigines of its sandy and marshy soil.
Time brought into notice this slave mart, and merchants from Havana sent out agents to establish their deposits of goods and permanent barracoons. The double and treble call for slaves soon dispopulated the immediate Interior, when it became urgent for the natives of Gallinas to extend their wars further into the Interior. And in a few more years this river was surrounded with wars, but as the slave factories supplied them with powder and guns, they made headway against a multitude of enemies who, not understanding the politics of alliance, fought them separately and were generally repulsed.