I also discovered something crucial that contrasts sharply with what many African Americans are taught about our history. As students, black people are repeatedly told that we all descend from slavery, and that we all were (and only were) slaves. Most people assume that every black American who lived in the US before 1870 was a slave.
That is simply not true.
In 1860, three years before the Emancipation Proclamation, The United States Federal Census Schedule reported 488,070 free black Americans. True, many might say quasi-free, since these African Americans could not vote. But free they still were — almost half a million of them — roughly 12.5% of the entire African-American population at that time.
You were lied to about that and pretty much everything else. Welcome to the Great Awakening.
BTW: the first slaves brought to America were Irish children, as far as I know.
No group has ever suffered as much at the hands of history in America as the Irish but they were the wrong color to care about.
Reminds me of gangs of new york
Some of those blacks were also slave owners.
That ran indentured white slaves
Good for him!
Good for that dude for researching!