Many blacks were slave owners. Interracial marriage wasn't needed.
Some freepers who know about history in the south could point you to that information.
In the agrarian south, free people of color needed farm labor to succeed, just as surely as anyone else did. I'm amazed that anyone finds it controversial. There were bound Europeans and bound Native Americans, and there were European and Native Americans to whom they were bound, well before the African slave trade really got going in the late eighteenth century. There were African-descended people in the colonies, who were never bound, who had bound servants. Orphans were routinely bound out until the age of majority. Nobody is taught what actually occurred anymore.
ONE of the THREE slave-owners in my home county was a Black man.
free dixie,sw
Yes,but most of the black slaveholders were men who were offspring of white slaveholders and slave women.This mulatto elite identified more with their fathers than their mother's people.