To: goldworldnet who wrote (330750 ) 12/19/2002 8:47:04 AM From: Neocon Read Replies (2) | Respond to Even while the British colonists were complaining of being treated oppressively because their legislatures were suspended, some were sending ships to West Africa to buy prisoners from slave raids, ripped from their families. While ratifying the self- evidency of equality of birth, slavers were packing their holds with captives, so cramped and bound that by the end of the voyage a least a third would be dead. In America, they would not merely be bondsmen, but chattel, that is, they would basically be regarded as livestock. For decades, they could not legally be baptized nor married; their children could be sold away from them at any time; there were no laws governing their treatment, and they could be killed for no reason; their women were beyond protection, and the master and his sons would often take their ease in the slave quarters; they could not be taught to read or write; and overseers were often given a free, brutal hand in their discipline. Even as slavery became more humane, and manumission became more commonplace, the South was prepared to precipitate a bloody war to preserve racial domination. After losing the Civil War, the South introduced Jim Crow, manipulated sharecropping to crush blacks with debt, and looked the other way as the KKK enforced the racial order by terror. Nevertheless, there was black progress, and by the end of the Second World War, it became increasingly intolerable to have blacks treated, at best, as second class citizens, when they were required to fight for their country, and had suffered so patiently.
