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Slavery?

With a hat tip to Billy Beck for drawing it to my attention, I’ll pass along the attached from Dan Gifford. It shows quite a bit about the state of race relations today. Most of the accusations being tossed at whitey have no concept of history whatsoever, as he points out.

Spike Lee and his fellow believers need a history lesson about slavery. It’s a lesson I noticed long ago he and others needed when I played a prison guard in his film, “Malcolm X.”

Nothing has changed.

After the film he directed, The BlacKkKlansman, won Best Adapted Screenplay, Lee opened by bringing up 1619 and marking 400 years since “our ancestors were stolen from Mother Africa and brought to Jamestown, Virginia, enslaved.”

Wrong.

The Aftricans brought to Jamestown in 1619 had been saved from slavery. And they could not be made slaves in Jamestown because slavery did not yet exist.

In contrast, Virginia Governor “blackface” Northam got slammed for saying the Africans brought to the Virginia colony in 1619 were indentured servants, not slaves.

Only partially right. They were made indentured servants just like the many white indentured in Virginia then.

If you missed the Northam connection that brought the subject to the fore, that started when CBS’ Gayle King pushed back on the Virginia governor a month ago when he used the term “indentured servants” as a euphemism for slavery, according to many news accounts.

No euphemism. King was blathering an oft repeated political narrative as did Spike Lee.

What really happened.

In 1619, a Dutch warship arrived at the English settlement of Jamestown with 20 or so Africans taken from a Portuguese slave ship. They were left at Jamestown in return for provisions.

Since there were no slave laws in Virginia then, neither the newly arrived Africans or anyone else was a slave or could be made a slave. What Virginia had and all other colonies had was indentured servitude. That was the system whereby a poor person would agree, in a legally binding contract, to work for a specific time for the person who paid their ship passage to what became America.

So the Africans were treated as indentured servants to provide labor worth the provisions exchanged to the Dutch just like the English indentured poor. When their indenture was over, the Africans were given the same opportunities as the English. They were given what were known as “freedom dues,” which usually included a piece of land and supplies, including a gun. Black-skinned or white-skinned, they became free.

It’s important to know the first Virginia colonists did not think of themselves as “white” or use that word to describe themselves. They saw themselves as Christians or Englishmen, or in terms of their social class. They were nobility, gentry, artisans, or servants.

As demands for labor grew, so did the cost of indentured servants. Many landowners also felt threatened by newly freed servants demand for land. The colonial elite realized the problems of indentured servitude. Landowners turned to Africans as a more profitable and renewable source of labor and the shift from indentured servants to racial slavery began.
Massachusetts was the first to legalize slavery in 1641 and Virginia in 1661.

However, free blacks remained free.

An African named Anthony Johnson was one of those who had been freed from servitude and he owned land, cattle and indentured servants of his own. Ironically, when servitude gradually morphed into slavery, Johnson became the first known slave owner in what became America.

Yes, a black man was the first slave owner in the American colonies.

The 1619 myth isn’t the only one regarding slavery that persists. One of the other beliefs I suspect CBS’ King also holds is that all blacks in the ante-bellum South were slaves. Not so.

PBS’ Harvard historian Louis Gates, among others, notes there were around 500,000 free blacks who owned their own property and many of those owned slaves. In fact, one of the largest slave owners in South Carolina noted in the 1860 census was a black man named William Ellison who owned more than 30 slaves.

None of the aforementioned should be taken as my endorsement or mitigation of servitude or slavery. But I point out the above because the counter claims are persistent pieces of historical misrepresentation that are used to keep Americans at each other’s throats about race.

It’s as I’ve been saying for quite a while now and taking a lot of heat for saying it…. The only reason racism still exists in this country is there’s an awful lot of people using it for a crutch, and Spike Lee is certainly one of these.