Quite an interesting AND thought provoking article and well worth the read. Just a little bit of its content is below A reading of the 1860 census reveals some fascinating details into the realities of slavery. While it’s universally known is that whites owned slaves in the early United States; almost universally unknown is that free blacks owned a fair number themselves. In the lead-up to the Civil War, the free population of the entire United States, which also counted approximately 10% the black population (the other 90% of blacks were enslaved in 15 southern states), stood at just over 27 million. The slave population was just under 4 million. Black ownership wasn’t a new phenomenon in the 1800s. Sources dating back to 1650 reveal that one of the first court-won challenges codifying human chattel as property went to a black man. A local court ruled in favor of Anthony Johnson’s ownership of John Casor, declaring that the former owned the latter for life. https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/08/do_blacks_owe_other_blacks_reparations.html IF the subject of reparations is ever to be taken seriously this area will DEFINTELY need to be addressed and maybe quite uncomfortable for some to deal with.
B-B-But you are suggesting genuine fairness and equal treatment across racial lines for everybody! Didn't the Dem Party's leadership make that illegal during the Obama years?
Most of the slaves came from the Ghana, Mali and Songhai Empires of Central Africa (south of the Sahara). Prior to the TransAtlantic slave trade routes, they primarily traded slaves with Northen Africa and Europe for horses, which were integral to their empire's militaries (which also partially consisted of slaves pressed into spear regiments). The Mali Empire, at its height, had enough gold (mined more by farmers during their long dry seasons than slaves, oddly enough), that when Mansa Musa (iirc) made his pilgrimage to Mecca (these empires were predominantly Muslim- the slaves were mostly the local tribal religions) and gave out so much gold along his journey, purely for celebrity status, that he crashed the gold markets in Europe and Asia and had to lend them more to restabilize the (at that time) global market. Regional strife between these Empires had caused a radical decline by the time the TransAtlantic slave routes to the New World were established, and the faltering Central African empires subsisted themselves mostly by capturing and selling eachother's, and then their own citizens until they collapsed entirely.
