I found this interesting because I hadn’t heard of some of these claims before. Some Googling:
1) Anthony Johnson was a real tobacco farmer and slave owner. He is listed as owning four white and one black indentured servant. He was the first legal slave owner in that he was the plaintiff in a case that ended with the first time a colonial court declared someone a slave in a civil case.
2) William Ellison was a real rags-to-riches story. A slave who bought his own freedom and became fabulously wealthy. He was actually the largest slave owner in South Carolina, though. (Not NC)
3) Native Americans owned slaves just like anyone else with the means to do so.
4) According to 1830 U.S. census records, 3,775 free blacks—living mostly in the South—owned a total of 12,760 slaves.
5) I couldn’t find a source purporting that slaves could own land. In fact, legally considered property, slaves were not allowed to own property of their own.
6) Slavery in Africa has not only existed throughout the continent for many centuries, but continues in the current day. Systems of servitude and slavery were common in parts of the continent, as they were in much of the ancient world.
7) With the exception of Portuguese controlled Angola, coastal African leaders “generally controlled access to their coasts, and were able to prevent direct enslavement of their subjects and citizens.”
8) The Sumerian Code of Ur-Nammu includes laws relating to slaves, written circa 2100 – 2050 BCE; it is the oldest known tablet containing a law code surviving today
9) True, I suppose, in that white majority nations such as those in Europe and North America eventually criminalized slavery.
Perhaps a more interesting and truthful fact than #5 might be that reparations already happened in the form of ‘40 Aces and a Mule’.
annaxmalina
titsay
