I came across the following post on an online bible study group on an internet dating website:
OMG, The First Slave OWNER in the USA was a Black Man
“This is going to be a shocker to many of you, but the first slave OWNER in America was indeed a Black man name Anthony Johnson. He was captured in Angola Africa by North African Muslims (hello), then sold to a Virginia farmer as an indentured servant. His indentured status was to last a maximum of 10 years by law, and upon his freedom, he himself purchase indentured servants. Prior to one of those servant’s expiration of servitude, Anthony Johnson applied to the government for the right to keep him FOR LIFE (actual slavery). This occurred in 1654, and this marked the beginning of slavery in the USA, and it was BEGUN by a BLACK MAN. The slave trade in the USA followed after that and at the beginning of the Civil War of the USA, several of the slave OWNERS were themselves BLACK.
North African Muslims were the biggest slave traders in history and it is estimated that they enslaved about
200 million people over the course of 1400 years.
Europe and America practiced slavery for less than a third of that time.
So this idea that slavery was invented by and/or promoted the biggest by the European WHITE man is pure bunk.”
My Reply was as follows:
Hello to everyone,
I was shocked by the inaccuracy of the Opening Post with race being such a sensitive issue. Firstly the title of the post is factually incorrect and should be:
The first legal slave owner in American history was a black tobacco farmer named Anthony Johnson.
“Possibly true. The wording of the statement is important. Anthony Johnson was not the first slave owner in American history, but he was, according to historians, among the first to have his lifetime ownership of a servant legally sanctioned by a court.
A former indentured servant himself, Anthony Johnson was a “free negro” who owned a 250-acre farm in Virginia during the 1650s, with five indentured servants under contract to him. One of them, a black man named John Casor, claimed that his term of service had expired years earlier and Johnson was holding him illegally. In 1654, a civil court found that Johnson in fact owned Casor’s services for life, an outcome historian R Halliburton Jr. calls “one of the first known legal sanctions of slavery — other than as a punishment for crime.” (Source: Snopes.Com)
One has to remember that legal forms of slavery were practiced all over the world, and indentured servitude and chattel slavery are quite different things. The former often had the agreement of the people involved, was legal at that time and had been practiced in biblical times (Ex 21:2) and even before. The latter however, in its most extreme and heinous form as practiced by Europeans transported an estimated 11 million people from various parts of Africa to America, transported in squalid conditions, often without keeping records of those being transported, throwing people overboard in forms of mass baptism, not really caring whether people lived or died, with conditions improving little for many over the approximately 400 years it lasted. One has to remember churches owned slaves, and the 11 million transported is virtually double the number of people who died in the Jewish Holocaust, and with scant records kept of deaths who knows how many African lives perished because of this inhumanity. Here is some information that at least attempts to assess that:
“The trans-Atlantic slave trade was the largest movement of people in history. Between 10 and 15 million Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic between 1500 and 1900. But this figure grossly understates the actual number of Africans enslaved, killed, or displaced as a result of the slave trade. At least 2 million Africans–10 to 15 percent–died during the infamous “Middle Passage” across the Atlantic. Another 15 to 30 percent died during the march to or confinement along the coast. Altogether, for every 100 slaves who reached the New World, another 40 had died in Africa or during the Middle Passage.” (Source: Digital History)
Here is a scripture to consider:
This is what the LORD says: “For three sins of Gaza, even for four, I will not relent. Because she took captive whole communities and sold them to Edom, (Amos 1:6).
I’m not saying Europeans are being spoke of explicitly in this scripture, but their actions are comparable to how Gaza is described, and it clearly seems that God sees this type of action as being wrong. What nations have done what is mentioned in Amos 1:6 above, but not only that – transported chattel slaves thousands of miles across the planet, to help with building up land they stole from another race of people? The overwhelming majority of these actions done by force, even under the banner of religion?
Going back to the premise of the Opening Post, also consider that slavery started in “The New World” in 1620, Anthony Johnson became a indentured slave owner in the 1650’s which is about a generation after the initial influx of people. Are we seriously saying that for that entire 30 year gap, all African slaves bought and sold between European people in within America were done so illegally? Not one of those white slave owners or traders sought legal means to own slaves? If this is true, why did European white slave owners prefer illegal chattel slavery over indentured labour? What of the people who were born into slavery, did they not become legal property of the people who probably illegally owned their mother or father?
The premise I feel that was implied by the Opening Post seems to say, “don’t blame us for slavery, your people practiced it first”. As a black person, that’s what I read – between the lines. It’s a very superficial and inaccurate supposition. We definitely need to understand the different types of slavery that existed, how long those types of slavery existed, and the full context of the case in question – none of which were provided and which I have now clarified. Trans-Atlantic slavery and the societies impacted and borne out of it have created a very marked impact on societies right across the planet, and this led to the indentured labour in America practiced by both black and white people of which author of the Opening Post’s writes. The issue he misses is that as the initial influx of chattel slavery was illegal. Therefore all the indentured labour that followed it stemmed from that initial act, and in every instance was an act of injustice and simply an extension of the initial system of chattel slavery. If the slaves had not been transported half way across the world in the first place none of that would have happened, no “indentured labour” in America, no Jim Crow and Segregation, there would also be no race problem, at least involving the lives of black people in the USA today, although I am sure the Europeans would have found another culture to demonise, like Native American’s or Hispanics – perhaps this shows its ugly face in the shape of Donald Trump, who cannot help but laden his speech and writing with such contemptuousness even now.
There is a deep seated guilt in European culture that wants to distance itself from the acts of their forefathers in the past, for the most blinded this leads to a denial of history and its effects on the present day world. The social and economic impact of slavery is felt to this day. That display of inhumanity is what has led to this polarisation of cultures and colour, and keeps black and white communities in a flux of division and mistrust – with exceptions as people endeavour to live as people with love and respect for one another as God intended.
Europeans assume superiority because they have built huge and prosperous civilisations seeing themselves at the top of the tree, despising and dehumanising those who they used to help them get there, to this day. People of Colour assume inferiority low worth and status, as they try to live in the confines of European culture that by its language, economic structure and even in its interpretation of religion systematically dehumanises and oppresses them. These devices present in European society form a powerful hegemony which takes a concerted and sustained effort on the part of any Person of Colour to overcome.
There are many People of Colour caught up in a cycles of poverty and crime because of a mentality derived from the corrosive effects of this European cultural hegemony on our minds. In my mind this is what the famous Reggae artist Bob Marley talked of as “mental enslavery”. The unfortunate effect of this is that this type of behaviour by People of Colour only serves to perpetuate the European/white notions of superiority, and associating black with bad, white with good… We are at the level now in society where the patterns of thought and practice are so heavily embedded in people, both black and white, that it is probably written in our genes.
What a cursed trap for us all, both black and white! The black people can’t truly escape, the white people can see no reason why we are not free!
The very system or thing that People of Colour are claimed to be set free from, Trans-Atlantic Chattel Slavery, has a sting in its tail – that being the nature of the society created on the back of that system, treats us unfairly and attempts to limit the power for good in our minds. It’s like being freed from manacles only to find you are not fully accepted into society because you are black, in some ways much like the ex-convict who tries to integrate into society after having server their time.
But, what crime have People of Colour committed, other than being black? Is being black really a crime? Why do we suffer from the effects of being black years after this form of slavery ended? Do the children of convicts suffer in the same way? Are children born to a female convict in prison free, or do they also grow up in prison as a convict? What about that child’s children, and their children’s children, etc, at some point the person who was originally a convict and sent to prison will have served their sentence or died. The point I am making is that the children of convicts are not considered to be criminals, in severe cases where the parent is notorious, the child could have issues being accepted by society, but generally that is not the case, and you could only know about the history of the child’s parent if you knew them, or made a link through their family name.
However, in the case of being black, no matter what stratum of society you live in, this acceptance by society is based on the assumed and inferred qualities Europeans perceive about People of Colour, it’s nothing to do with whether your parents committed any type of criminality, whether you aspire to be a crook, a priest, a doctor, a sports star or a president. Being black is perpetually a crime at an implicit level in the European consciousness – it’s something visible, tangible at which they can direct their unease and/or hatred at in its various forms. It was a justification for physical slavery that existed hundreds of years ago, and the same notion exists today and is behind the malevolent devices that put up that invisible glass ceiling on you at work, disenfranchises you, skews the perceptions and tactics of law enforcement, perverts justice against you, perceives you as “the other” and unfortunately, I could go on and on and on…
The flip side is that Europeans consider the fact that Trans-Atlantic Slavery has been abolished to be pretty much the end of the matter, regardless of the fact that a difficult struggle for the rights of black people within European based societies continues to this day, in addition to the effects of colonialism and economic imperialism destabilising and decimating many African countries. When you think a problem is fixed, that something is atoned for, and it isn’t – that creates a problem that festers and morphs over time with the same underlying cause crying out to be remedied.
I don’t think the majority of European/white people want to see People of Colour suffer continual injustice, a small proportion do. The majority don’t see, perceive or adequately understand the effects of the culture they dominate causing harm to others, and a minority of European/white people do.
What could fix, or undo the effects of Trans-Atlantic Slavery? Freeing slaves? Giving black people the vote? Positive discrimination/affirmation? A token black president? I don’t think so! Surely only God knows the answer to that question!