Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Racially Incorrect Facts Regarding Race and Slavery
Townhall.com ^ | July 22, 2016 | Jack Kerwick

Posted on 07/22/2016 10:52:19 AM PDT by Kaslin

As was recently shown, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, with its central claim that police around the country are hunting and killing innocent black men, is a lie.

Yet the BLM myth is enmeshed within a larger narrative, a narrative of eternal White Racism. And couched within this tale are distortions and outright crucially false ideas of slavery.

In the interest of that “honest discussion” of race that the Eric Holders and Barack Obamas of the world claim to want, I submit considerations without which no such discussion can be had.

One glaringly inconvenient truth that, odds are, few folks of any race are aware is that the very first legal slave owner in America was one Anthony Johnson—a black man. More specifically, Johnson was an Angolan who himself had been an indentured servant in the colony of Virginia before he became a tobacco planter himself. One of the African indentured servants who worked Johnson’s 300 acre plot of land was John Casor.

When Casor had completed his seven year term of service to Johnson, he asked to be freed. Johnson refused. The latter did, however, agree to lend him out to a local white colonist, Robert Parker. Yet not long after having made this agreement Johnson had a change of heart and took Parker to court where he charged him with having robbed him of his “negro servant.”

In 1655, a white court sided with the black African over a white man and, in addition to making him pay damages to Johnson, ordered Parker to return Casor to Johnson.

However, Johnson v Parker issued a dramatic legal change: While making his case, Johnson, in referring to Casor, insisted that, “Thee had ye Negro for his life.”

Casor became the first legally recognized slave in the American colonies. Johnson, then, was the first slave owner.

And Casor did in fact spend the rest of his natural existence toiling for his master.

Johnson was the first American slave owner, black or white. Yet he certainly wasn’t the last black man in America to own slaves. Joseph E. Holloway, a professor of Pan-African studies at California State University, is among those who note that there were thousands of black slave owners during the antebellum period. But Holloway also reveals some other startling—politically incorrect—facts:

Relative to their numbers in the population (27 million according to the 1860 census), a miniscule number of whites owned slaves. Eight million whites lived in the South, but of these, fewer than 325,000 owned slaves. What this means is that only 1.4 percent of the total white population consisted of slave owners, and only 4.8 percent of the white Southern population did so.

In glaring contrast, in this same year, there were 4.5 million blacks living in America, and 500,000 blacks in the South. Over half of these—261, 988—were freed men. In the city of New Orleans alone, more than 3,000 blacks owned slaves. That is, 28 percent of the free black population consisted of slave holders.

In 1830, the Census Bureau notes that free blacks owned more than 10,000 slaves in the states of Louisiana, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina. As Halloway remarks, “Large numbers of free Blacks owned black slaves in numbers disproportionate to their representation in society.”

In some cities during some decades in the 19th century, more than 75 percent of the free black population was comprised of slave holders, and some of these black masters owned property in slaves that rivaled that of some of their wealthiest white counterparts while far exceeding that of most slave owners. The widow C. Richards and her son, to cite the most notable example, owned 152 slaves.

Some other interesting—racially incorrect—facts:

For four decades (1630-1670), those Africans who became freedmen owned white indentured servants.

The majority of urban black slave owners were women.

Virtually all of the black slave masters were mulattoes who not only enslaved their darker brethren, but refused to marry or even attend church with freed men of darker hue.

This last fact, you can bet, is a particularly troubling one for the light-complexioned Holder and Obama.

But there are others.

Europeans didn’t get involved with African slavery until the 15th century—very late in the game, historically speaking. For at least the preceding 800-900 years, Arab Muslims had been trafficking in African slaves—all, of course, as even Obama’s friend and black Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates is at pains to show, with the cooperation of African leaders who had been enslaving their fellow Africans for even longer than this.

In their Peoples and Empires in West Africa: West Africa in History, 1000-1800, George T. Stride and Caroline Ifeka show that while slavery was endemic throughout the continent, there were several groups like, to note just some examples, the Oyo, Kaabu, and the Imbangala peoples that were particularly ruthless and brutal at enslaving. Some African slave holders, as the black American thinker Thomas Sowell has noted as well, used their slaves as human sacrifices in religious rituals.

In his Black Rednecks, White Liberals, in a chapter titled, “The Real History of Slavery,” Sowell’s commentary on the brutality of Arabic Muslims’ treatment of African slaves is particularly difficult to digest. Muslims, he says, “marched vast numbers of human beings from their homes [in Africa] where they had been captured to the places where they would be sold, hundreds of miles away, often spending months crossing the burning sands of the Sahara.”

Sowell adds: “The death toll on these marches exceeded even the horrific toll on packed slave ships crossing the Atlantic.”

But it wasn’t just scores of black Africans who were brutalized by Muslim slave traders. As books like Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, The Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800and White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narrativesconfirm, so too were millions of white Europeans and, in the 19th century, white Americans.

After all, it’s not for nothing that the very word “slave” derives from the experience of mass enslavement suffered by the Slavs, i.e. white people.

These are some racially inconvenient truths that neither President Obama nor any other RIC (Racism Industrial Complex) representative would ever want included in an “honest discussion” of race and “racism.”

There are, though, others that will be noted at a future time.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: blacks; democrat; history; jimcrow; kkk; racism; slavery; ushistory
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first 1-2021-33 next last

1 posted on 07/22/2016 10:52:19 AM PDT by Kaslin
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

BLM is a politically correct movement.

The opposite of politically correct is factually correct.


2 posted on 07/22/2016 10:53:55 AM PDT by joshua c (Allah's paradise is full of mass murderers)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

bookmark


3 posted on 07/22/2016 10:59:16 AM PDT by SatinDoll (A NATURAL BORN CITIZEN IS BORN IN THE USA OF TWO USA CITIZENS)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

POLITICALLY CORRECT = RADICALLY INCORRECT


4 posted on 07/22/2016 11:01:02 AM PDT by Jim W N
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

Bookmark


5 posted on 07/22/2016 11:01:20 AM PDT by Chgogal (A woman who votes for Hillary is voting with her vagina and not her brain.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: joshua c

BLM, aka Obama’s Army.


6 posted on 07/22/2016 11:01:51 AM PDT by Chgogal (A woman who votes for Hillary is voting with her vagina and not her brain.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

An interesting set of novels is the Benjamin January series by Barbara Hambly. January is a free man of color in New Orleans in the 1830s. He was born a slave but freed by his mother’s “protector” - a white planter. His father was all African and his mother was mulatto. His mother was also freed and owned slaves. Interesting look at the system back then in NO.


7 posted on 07/22/2016 11:08:59 AM PDT by Mercat (Boredom is a problem on the inside. And happiness, too, is an inside job.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

bookmark


8 posted on 07/22/2016 11:13:57 AM PDT by freds6girlies (many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first. Mt. 19:30. R.I.P. G & J)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

Interesting. Sobering.


9 posted on 07/22/2016 11:15:54 AM PDT by Robert A Cook PE (I can only donate monthly, but socialists' ABBCNNBCBS continue to lie every day!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

If White Racism is, indeed, eternal and irremediable, then there are two choices for behaviour in that light; learn to live with it and deal with it or kill or enslave all white people. Moslems and BLM seem to have reached similar conclusions as to how to proceed.


10 posted on 07/22/2016 11:20:56 AM PDT by arthurus
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin; 2ndDivisionVet; null and void; aragorn; EnigmaticAnomaly; kalee; TWhiteBear; Salvation; ...
Image and video hosting by TinyPic

One glaringly inconvenient truth that, odds are, few folks of any race are aware is that the very first legal slave owner in America was one Anthony Johnson — a black man.

Check out article.

11 posted on 07/22/2016 11:26:11 AM PDT by LucyT
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

** Bookmark**


12 posted on 07/22/2016 11:29:18 AM PDT by NonLinear (Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

I spent some time in Liberia.

You know what the freed slaves from the US did when they got back to Africa?

You guessed it, they enslaved the backs that were already there.


13 posted on 07/22/2016 11:29:36 AM PDT by Gamecock (There is always one more idiot than you counted on.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin
Denish Desouza,s new movie, Hillarys America gives some interesting facts on slavery in America that the left would rather you didn't know. Go see it and take your liberal friend, cousin, neighbor and watch his head explode . And I mean that in the nicest possible way! ; )
14 posted on 07/22/2016 11:40:42 AM PDT by Ditter (God Bless Texas!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

If it wasn’t for African slave-raiding and muslim slave-trading in Africa, there would have been no slavery in the New World.

The great majority of New World slaves toiled in the Caribbean and in South America. Slavery in what become the U.S. was small in comparison.


15 posted on 07/22/2016 11:46:29 AM PDT by Honorary Serb (Kosovo is Serbia! Free Srpska! Abolish ICTY!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

Bump


16 posted on 07/22/2016 11:48:45 AM PDT by Incorrigible (If I lead, follow me; If I pause, push me; If I retreat, kill me.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

Slavery as practiced in the old South and in 16th Century Europe was introduced by muslims. Had there been no Islam then it is doubtful that slavery would have ever arisen in Europe and America.

Mohammed & Charlemagne Revisited: The Epilogue by Emmet Scott
http://www.newenglishreview.org/Emmet_Scott/Mohammed_%26_Charlemagne_Revisited%3A_The_Epilogue/


17 posted on 07/22/2016 11:50:43 AM PDT by PIF (They came for me and mine ... now it is your turn ...)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Honorary Serb

Muslims created the “markets” for capture and transport of African slaves for many centuries before Europeans ever got there. Local and regional African tribes did the killing, capture, and enslavement of their neighbors. European slave trading, when it finally developed, tapped into centuries old traditions of barbaric enslavement.

That doesn’t absolve anyone who was involved in slavery, but it is ludicrous for leftards to pretend that slavery was only about white Europeans or later Americans...


18 posted on 07/22/2016 11:52:46 AM PDT by Enchante (Hillary's new campaign slogan: "Guilty as hell, free as a bird!! Laws are for peasants!")
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 15 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin
I am puzzling over these two consecutive paragraphs.

Relative to their numbers in the population (27 million according to the 1860 census), a miniscule number of whites owned slaves. Eight million whites lived in the South, but of these, fewer than 325,000 owned slaves. What this means is that only 1.4 percent of the total white population consisted of slave owners, and only 4.8 percent of the white Southern population did so.

In glaring contrast, in this same year, there were 4.5 million blacks living in America, and 500,000 blacks in the South. Over half of these—261, 988—were freed men. In the city of New Orleans alone, more than 3,000 blacks owned slaves. That is, 28 percent of the free black population consisted of slave holders.

If I am reading this right, there were 325k slave owners, but only 250k slaves (500k in south, 261k freed men)?

19 posted on 07/22/2016 11:53:20 AM PDT by T. P. Pole
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Ditter

I plan on going on Sunday.

The spouse who thinks democrats are basically good refuses to see it. She won’t vote for them at least.


20 posted on 07/22/2016 11:53:33 AM PDT by wally_bert (I didn't get where I am today by selling ice cream tasting of bookends, pumice stone & West Germany)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 14 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first 1-2021-33 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson