This is the first time I’ve written about this subject – obviously I’ve avoided it because it’s so tragic. Recently I came across a write-up titled, “America’s Original Sin” in The Week magazine of 8/30/19 that presented an excellent picture of slavery and how it shaped this country.

WHO BROUGHT IN THE FIRST SLAVES?

In 1619 or 401 years ago (more than a year before the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock) an English ship named the White Lion landed in Virginia. The crew traded between 20 and 30 Africans in chains for food from the natives. This is the first instance of enslaved people arriving in one of the 13 colonies.

HOW WERE THESE PEOPLE TREATED?

At first, the Africans were considered indentured servants, not slaves, because many of them had been baptized Christian when they were seized. They were forced to work in the fields alongside about 1,000 white indentured servants. Conditions were brutal. Many workers died before their terms of service expired. White Europeans sold themselves into servitude (four to seven years) in exchange for transportation to the New World. A handful of Africans also managed to work their way to freedom.

WHAT CHANGED BETWEEN 1619 AND 1650?

Whites gradually imposed a rigid racial caste system that locked Africans into perpetual status as lesser beings with no rights. In 1662, the colony decreed that children born to enslaved women would inherit their mother’s status. In 1676, an uprising by white and black workers deeply alarmed the aristocracy. By the early 18th century the colonies had passed slave codes that stripped blacks of all rights.

WHY DID SLAVERY SPREAD IN THE SOUTH?

Quite simply: it made those who owned slaves very rich. Southern planters growing tobacco and rice had a great need for workers and slaves were cheaper than indentured servants. By 1756 enslaved people made up more than a quarter of the population in and around the city of New York. Then in 1860, there were 4.4 million black people living in the United States – of those 3.9 million were enslaved.

HOW DID SLAVE LABOR AFFECT THE UNITED STATES?

It was critical to the economic success of the American colonies. Enslaved workers even built the Capitol and the White House in Washington. It gradually declined in the North, but the invention of the cotton gin made it even more popular in the South. Cotton made up more than half of all U.S. exports during the antebellum period.

Enslaved workers laid nearly 10,000 miles of railroad tracks – a third of the nation’s total by the time of the Civil War. “The idea that the forced labor of blacks is what made America is not what people are happy to hear,” wrote historian Edward Baptist. “But it’s the truth.”

WHAT IS SLAVERY’S IMPRINT ON AMERICA TODAY?

When federal troops pulled out of the South in 1877, the newly freed slaves were locked out of political and economic life. A century of legal discrimination crippled black families’ ability to get decent educations, find jobs, buy homes and build wealth. That legacy endures: in 2016, the average black family had a net worth of $17,600 – compared with $171,000 for the average white family.

Shaun Nelson-Henrick