They built the richest country in the history of the world.
They were never paid a single dollar.
They were beaten if they slowed down.
Their children were born into chains.
Their families were sold apart at auction-like furniture.
This happened for 246 years in America.
The same America that wrote, “All men are created equal.
” This is the story they never wanted you to know.
1619.
That number, that year, that is where the story of black America in this country begins.
19 was the year the first enslaved Africans were brought to the shores of what would become the United States of America.
They came off a ship called e the White Lion.
There were approximately 20 of them, men and women.
They had been torn from their homes in Africa, packed onto a Portuguese slave ship, and then seized at sea by English privateeers who traded them to Virginia colonists in exchange for food and supplies.
20 people traded for food.
That was the beginning.
And from that beginning over the E next 246 years, what grew was one of the most brutal, most calculated, and most far-reaching systems of human oppression the world has ever seen.
12 million African men, women, and children were stolen from their homes, chained, shipped across an ocean in conditions so horrifying that 2 million of them died on the way and then forced to work without pay, without rights, without freedom, on the land that would become the richest nation in the history of the world.
They built America with their hands, with their labor, with their suffering, with their blood.
And most people even today do not know the full story.
This is that story.
All of it.
From Africa before the chains ever came all the way to today and the long shadow that 400 years of slavery still casts across America.
Nothing left out.
Nothing softened.
This is the truth they never told you.
Before we talk about slavery, before we talk about ships and chains and auction blocks, we have to go back further.
We have to go back to Africa because here is the first lie they told you.
They told you that Africa was a dark continent, primitive, undeveloped, waiting to be discovered.
They taught you that African people had no civilization, no culture, no history worth speaking of before the Europeans arrived.
That is not just wrong.
That is one of the most deliberate lies in the history of education.
And let me tell you what Africa actually was.
In the year 1235, a warrior king named Sundiata united the Mandinka people of West Africa and founded what would become one of the most powerful empires on the planet, the Mali Empire.
For over 300 years, the Mali Empire dominated West Africa.
At its peak, it stretched across an area larger than Western Europe.
It controlled the most important trade routes on the continent.
It sat on top of the largest gold fields in the known world.
And it was home to cities, real cities with architecture, markets, courts of law, systems of government, and centers of learning that rivaled anything in Europe at the time.
The greatest of those cities was Timbuktu.
When most people hear the word Timbuktu today, they think it means somewhere far away, somewhere mythical, somewhere that barely exists.
That is exactly what they wanted you to think because the real Timbuktu was extraordinary.
At its height, Timbuktu had a population of over 100,000 people.
It had three major universities.
It had over 180 schools.
It had libraries that held hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, books on mathematics, astronomy, medicine, law, history, poetry, and philosophy written by African scholars in African cities at a time when most of Europe could barely read.
Timbuktu’s Sanor University was one of the greatest centers of learning in the medieval world.
25,000 students studied there.
Scholars came from across Africa from Arabia from Persia from as far away as Indiato study in the libraries of Timbuktu.
Oxford University was founded in 1096.
Timbuktu’s Sankor University had already been teaching students for over a century before that.
And then there was the man who ruled over all of this.
His name was Mansam Musa.
He became emperor of Mali in 1312.
And historians who have studied his wealth, scholars at institutions like Harvard and Stanford and Princeton have estimated that Mansam Musa was in terms of real assets and purchasing power the wealthiest individual human being who has ever lived.
Not the richest person in Africa, not the richest person of his era, the richest person in all of human history.
In 1324, Mansam Musa made his pilgrimage to Mecca.
It was a journey of over 4,000 mi, and he made it with a caravan of 60,000 people.
Think about that number for a moment.
60,000 people in one traveling party.
He brought 500 servants who each carried a solid gold staff.
He brought 100 camels, each one loaded with 300 lb of gold dust.
He gave gold freely as gifts along the entire route.
He gave so much gold in Egypt, in Arabia, in every city he passed through that he flooded the gold markets of the entire region.
The price of gold across North Africa and the Middle East collapsed.
Economies were destabilized.
It took 12 years for the gold markets to recover.
One man dot one journey.
He accidentally broke the global economy just by being generous with his own wealth.
After Mali came the Shonghai Empire which grew to become the largest empire in the history of the African continent.
The Sanghai Empire at its peak covered an area of roughly 1.
4 million square kilmters.
It had a professional army.
It had a civil service.
It had a taxation system.
Idi had courts of justice with trained judges who knew Islamic law.
It had governor controlled provinces.
It was by any definition of the word a highly sophisticated state and it was not alone.
In central Africa, the Kingdom of Congo had a central government, a currency system, roads connecting its provinces, and a court that received ambassadors from Portugal and Spain as diplomatic equals.
In East Africa, the cities of the Swahili coast, Kilwa, Mombasa, Zanzibar, Melindi had been trading with Arabia, Persia, India, and China for over a thousand years.
Chinese porcelain and Indian textiles have been found in East African archaeological sites dating back to before the year 900,000 years before colonization.
Africa was not waiting to be discovered.
Africa was already connected to the world.
It was already thriving.
And then the Europeans came.
In the 1400s, Portuguese ships began sailing south along the West African coast.
Their stated purpose was trade and exploration.
Their real purpose became something far darker.
In 1441, a young Portuguese captain named Anttow Gonzalves captured 12 Africans on the coast of what is now Moritania.
He brought them back to Lisbon as gifts for Prince Henry of Portugal.
Prince Henry was delighted.
He gave Gonalves a reward and sent him back for more.
those 12 people, that one journey, that one royal approval, that was the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade.
What started with 12 people in 1441 would grow over the next four centuries into the largest forced migration of human beings in the history of the world.
The Atlantic slave trade ran for approximately 400 years from the mid400s to the mid 1800s.
During that time, historians estimate that between 12 and 13 million Africans were forcibly taken from the continent and shipped to the Americas.
12 to 13 million people.
They came from all across West and Central Africa.
From what is now Sagal, Ghana, Nigeria, Angola, the Congo.
They were farmers.
They were craftsmen.
They were traders.
They were teachers.
They were parents.
They were children.
They were grandparents.
They were people with names and histories and families and futures.
And they were taken.
The process of capture was brutal.
From the very first moment, some were taken in raids.
Armed men, sometimes African slave traders working in partnership with European merchants.
Sometimes European soldiers themselves would descend on a village in the night.
They would burn the homes.
They would kill anyone who resisted.
They would chain the survivors together in a line and march them sometimes for hundreds of miles to the coast.
That march was called the slave coffle.
People walked in chains through jungle and savannah without enough food or water for weeks at a time.
Many died before they even reached the coast.
At the coast, they were held in fortresses called slave castles.
These castles still stand today.
Places like Elmina Castle in Ghana, Cape Coast Castle, Gore Island off the coast of Sagal.
Inside these castles, enslaved people were held in dark airless dungeons, sometimes for weeks or months, while slave merchants waited for ships.
There was a place in these castles called the door of no return.
It was a door that opened directly onto the beach.
Once you walked through that door, you were loaded onto a ship and you would never see Africa again.
That journey across the Atlantic was called the middle passage.
It was called the middle passage because it was the middle leg of the triangular trade.
European ships left Europe carrying manufactured goods, guns, cloth, alcohol, iron bars.
They traded those goods in Africa for enslaved people.
They then carried the enslaved people across the Atlantic to the Americas.
Then they loaded up with sugar, tobacco, cotton, and rumin sailed back to Europe to sell it.
Three legs, three continents, one closed circle of profit built entirely on human suffering.
The crossing itself, the middle passage, was one of the most horrifying experiences a human being could endure.
On the ships, enslaved people were packed into the hold below deck.
The space allocated to each person was described in the records of the time.
On many ships, each person was given a space 6 ft long and 16 in wide.
That is the size of a shelf.
Shelf.
They lay in those spaces, chained to the person beside them and the person above them, unable to sit up, unable to turn over, unable to stand, unable to move.
The heat in the hold could reach over 100°.
There was no ventilation.
There was no sanitation.
People lay in their own filth and in the filth of everyone around them.
Disease spread through the hold like wildfire.
Dissentry.
small pox, measles, typhoid.
The crossing took anywhere from 3 weeks to three months depending on the winds and the route.
During that time, people died every day.
Of the 12 million people who boarded those ships, historians estimate that approximately 2 million never survived the crossing.
2 million people dead in the middle of the ocean.
Their bodies thrown overboard.
No graves, no markers, no records of their names, just gone.
And yet, even in those impossible conditions, people resisted.
There are documented records of over 400 slave ship rebellions that took place during the middle passage.
Enslaved people broke their chains.
They overpowered guards.
They set fires.
They took control of ships.
In 1839, an enslaved man named Sangbe Pierre, also known as Joseph Sinke, led a rebellion aboard a Spanish slave ship called the Amistad.
He and the other captives freed themselves, killed the captain and the cook, and ordered the surviving crew to sail them back to Africa.
The crew tricked them, and sailed north instead to the coast of America.
The case went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States.
Former President John Quincy Adams argued for their freedom.
They won.
They were not passive.
They were not defeated.
They fought back from the very first day.
When the ships finally reached the Americas, the ports of Charleston and Savannah in the south, the docks of New Orleans, the harbors of Virginia, the surviving enslaved people were unloaded, cleaned up, and prepared for sale.
They were examined like livestock.
Their teeth were checked.
Their muscles were assessed.
Their bodies were inspected in ways that no human being should ever be subjected to.
And then they were placed on auction blocks and sold to the highest bidder.
Husbands separated from wives, mothers separated from children, brothers from sisters, families destroyed in an afternoon for the sake of a transaction.
And no one was required to explain it.
No one was required to justify it because the law said these were not people.
These were property and property can be sold to whoever wants to buy it.
The system of slavery in America did not happen by accident.
It was built deliberately law by law over the course of decades.
When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, the legal category of slave did not yet formally exist in the dun American colonies.
Some of those early Africans were classified as indentured servants.
They worked for a fixed number of years and at the end of their indenture they were technically free.
But that changed quickly because the colonial planters had a problem.
They needed labor.
enormous, relentless, backbreaking labor grow the tobacco and rice and later the cotton that made the colonies wealthy and indentured servants who were eventually freed were not efficient enough for their purposes.
So they began building a new system.
In 1640, a Virginia court sentenced an African man named John Punchto serve his master for the rest of his natural life, while his two white companions who ran away with him received only extended indentures.
That ruling is considered one of the first legal distinctions made in America between white servants and black servants.
In 1662, Virginia passed a law stating that the status of a child, free or enslaved, would follow the status of the mother.
This was a catastrophic law because it meant that if an enslaved woman had a child, that child was born into slavery.
No matter who the father was, even if the father was the slaveholder himself, this law turned enslaved women into a breeding population.
Their children were not people to be loved and raised.
Their children were property to be owned and sold.
By 1705, Virginia had passed a comprehensive set of laws called the Virginia slave codes.
These codes were the legal architecture of American slavery.
They said, “All servants imported from non-Christian nations shall be accounted and be slaves.
” Meaning, if you were African, you were a slave.
They said that enslaved people were personal property, that they could be bought, sold, leased, inherited, and used as payment for debts.
They said that enslaved people could not own property, could not testify in court, could not leave their plantation without written permission from their enslaver, could not learn to read, could not legally marry, could not carry a weapon, could not raise a hand to a white person, even in self-defense.
And any enslaved person who violated any of these rules could be legally beaten, legally branded, legally tortured, and legally killed.
This was the world that enslaved black people in America were born into.
A world designed from top to bottom to hold them in place forever.
And then the cotton gin arrived.
In 1793, a man named Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, a machine that could clean cotton 50 times faster than a person could by hand.
Suddenly, cotton became extraordinarily profitable.
The demand for cotton labor exploded and the demand for enslaved people to provide that labor exploded with it.
Between 1790 and 1860, the number of enslaved people in the United States grew from approximately 700,000 to nearly 4 million.
4 million people owned.
By 1860, enslaved black people in the American South represented more total financial value than all the railroads and all the banks in the entire United States combined.
The economy of the most powerful nation in the world was built on the bodies of enslaved African people.
What was life like inside that system? An enslaved person on a cotton plantation in Mississippi in 1850 woke before sunrise.
They lived in a wooden cabin with a dirt floor, no windows, no fireplace in many cases, shared with other families, sometimes eight or 10 people in a space the size of a small room.
They were given two sets of clothing per year.
They were given a food ration, typically a weekly allowance of cornmeal and salt pork.
That was it.
They worked from before sun up to after sundown, 6 days a week on most plantations.
Seven on many from the time they could walk and carry a water bagetto the day they died.
They were required to pick a quot of cotton every single day, often over 200.
On some plantations, the quotota was higher, and at the end of each day, their cotton was weighed.
If you met your quotota, you were safe for that day.
If you exceeded your quotota, your quotota was raised the next day.
If you fell short of your quotota, you were beaten.
The beating was not an informal punishment.
It was a scheduled systematic tool of control.
After the weighing at the end of each day, the overseer would administer lashes for every pound the enslaved person had fallen short.
1B short, one lash, £10 short, 10 lashes, £50 short, 50 lashes.
This was not something that happened occasionally.
This was the daily rhythm of plantation life.
The violence of American slavery went far beyond beatings.
Enslaved people were branded with hot irons.
Ears were cut off as punishment for running away.
Thumbs were cut off.
People were placed in devices called slave collars, metal rings locked around the neck with long spikes pointing outward that made it impossible to run through brush or lie down to sleep.
There are records in the legal archives of the American South, of enslaved people being buried alive, of people being dragged to death behind horses, of people being burned alive as public spectacles, as warnings to others who might think of resisting.
And all of it was legal.
Every single act of violence legal.
But in the middle of all of that, in the middle of the violence and the exhaustion and the grief, enslaved people held on to their humanity with everything they had, they formed families.
Not legal marriages.
Those were not permitted.
But real families, real bonds of love and loyalty that the law could not recognize but could never fully destroy.
They created music.
The spirituals songs like go down Moses, swing low, sweet chariot were not just songs of faith.
They were coded communications.
They contained hidden messages about escape routes, about when to run, about where help could be found.
They maintained African traditions, African languages, African food, African stories.
They built churches.
They educated their children in secret.
They created art.
The enslaved people of America were not broken people.
They were extraordinary people living inside an impossible situation.
and they were always always looking for a way out.
One of the greatest lies in American history is the image of the enslaved person as passive as someone who accepted their situation as someone who did not resist.
That image is a lie.
Enslaved people resisted every single day from 1619 to 1865 without stopping, without surrender.
The resistance took many forms.
On the plantation level, enslaved people practiced what historians call day-to-day resistance.
They worked slowly.
They broke tools.
They broke equipment.
They pretended not to understand instructions.
They set fire to barns and fields.
They poisoned food.
They sabotaged every system of production they were forced to work within.
This kind of resistance was enormously dangerous.
Being caught in an act of sabotage could mean death.
But they did it anyway because any act of resistance, even the smallest one, was an assertion that they were human beings, not machines, not tools, not property.
And then there was the act that terrified slaveholders more than anything else.
Running, tens of thousands of enslaved people ran away every year.
They ran north toward the free states.
They ran to cities where they could disappear into free black communities.
They ran to Native American nations that would accept them.
They ran to Florida, which was under Spanish control, where the Spanish promised freedom to any enslaved person from the British colonies who reached them.
Running was extraordinarily dangerous.
Slaveholders organized hunting parties.
They used trained dogs that could follow a sentent for miles.
Slave patrollers paid organized groups of white men, rode through the countryside at night specifically to catch runaways.
If you were caught, and most were caught, the punishment was severe.
whipping, branding, the cutting off of a toe or a foot, being sold away from your family to a plantation deeper south, where escape was even more impossible.
They ran anyway, and sometimes resistance was not quiet at all.
There were hundreds of organized slave revolts across American history, the Stono Rebellion of 1739 in South Carolina, where a group of approximately 100 enslaved people seized weapons from a store, killed guards, and marched south toward Florida and freedom.
Gabriel’s Rebellion in 1800 in Virginia where an enslaved blacksmith named Gabriel Prosa organized a plan to recruit thousands of enslaved people, march on Richmond, take the governor hostage and negotiate for freedom.
The plan was betrayed by an informant 2 days before it was set to begin.
Gabriel was captured and executed.
But he had organized over a thousand people.
They knew what they wanted.
They had a plan.
They were ready.
And then came Nat Turner.
Nat Turner was born into slavery on October the 2nd, 1800 in Southampton County, Virginia.
From his childhood, people around him recognized that he was different.
He was extraordinarily intelligent.
He taught himself to read.
He was deeply religious, spending hours each day in prayer and fasting.
He had visions, religious experiences that he believed were messages from God.
And what he believed God was telling him was that he had been chosen to lead his people to freedom.
On the night of August 21st, 1831, Nat Turner and six other enslaved men began the largest slave revolt in American history.
They moved through Southampton County through the night, gathering more men as they went, moving from plantation to plantation.
By the time the rebellion was suppressed 2 days later, the group had grown to approximately 70 men, and approximately 60 white people had been killed.
The reaction was immediate and ferocious.
Governor John Floyd called out the Virginia militia.
US Army and Marine forces were deployed.
The Navy sent ships.
White mobs, not just soldiers, went through the county, killing black people.
Any black person, free or enslaved, was in danger.
Historians estimate that over 100 black people were killed in the reprisals, many of them having nothing to do with the rebellion.
Nat Turner hid in the woods for 6 weeks.
He was eventually captured, tried, and hanged on November 11th, 1831.
After his execution, his body was skinned.
The skin was made into grease and into a purse.
This was done deliberately as a message.
But the message that southern slaveholders actually received was not the one they intended.
The message they received was fear.
Because if Nat Turner could organize a rebellion of 70 men on a quiet plantation in Virginia, then it could happen anywhere.
It could happen to anyone.
And no amount of violence could prevent it.
While rebellions burned from below, the call for freedom rose from a different direction as well.
Her name was Harriet Tubman, born Aramea Ross into slavery in Dorchester County, Maryland around 1822.
Her childhood was filled with violence.
As a young teenager, she was standing in a store when an overseer threw a 2 lb lead weight at an enslaved man who was trying to run.
He missed.
The weight struck Harriet in the head.
The injury almost killed her.
She fell into a coma and nearly died.
For the rest of her life, she suffered from narcolepsy.
sudden uncontrollable attacks of sleep as a direct result of that injury.
She experienced these sleep attacks every day of her life and every day of her life she kept moving.
In 1849, at the age of approximately 27, Harriet Tubman escaped north to Philadelphia.
She later said, “When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person.
There was such a glory over everything.
She was free and she could not stay free while everyone she loved was still in chains.
So she went back.
Over the next decade, Harriet Tubman made 19 returned trips into the South.
19 times she walked back into slave territory, disguised, armed, moving at night through woods and swamps.
Guided by the North Star and by a network of safe houses and allies called the Underground Railroad, she guided approximately 70 people to freedom.
She never lost a single one.
She carried a gun on every journey, and she was known to say that if any of the people she was leading lost their nerve and wanted to turn back, she would shoot them before she let them return and risk exposing the others.
The slave holders put a bounty on her head.
At its peak, the reward for her capture was $40,000, the equivalent of over a million today.
They never caught her.
During the Civil War, Harriet Tubman worked as a spy for the Union Army.
In 1863, she led an armed raid along the Kbehe River in South Carolina that freed more than 700 enslaved people in a single night.
She became the first woman in American history to lead an armed military raid.
While Harriet Tubman moved people to freedom with her courage, another voice was moving the entire nation with words.
Frederick Douglas was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in February of 1818 on a plantation in Talbert County, Maryland.
When he was an infant, he was separated from his mother, Harriet Bailey.
She was taken to work on another farm 12 mi away.
She would walk those 12 miles after her own day’s work ended in the dark to spend a few hours with her son, then walk back before dawn so she would not be punished for being absent.
She died when Frederick was 7 years old.
He was not allowed to be present at her death.
He taught himself to read in secret.
His enslaver’s wife had briefly taught him the alphabet before her husband forbade it, telling her that reading would make a slave unmanageable.
He was right.
Frederick Douglas used bread to bribe white children in the neighborhood to teach him words.
He practiced writing using the letters on ships, cargo in the dockyard where he worked.
He read every scrap of paper he could find.
And the more he read, the more clearly he understood the system he was trapped in.
And the more clearly he understood it, the more determined he became to escape it.
In 1838, at the age of 20, Frederick Douglas escaped to the north.
He disguised himself as a free black sailor, borrowed the identity papers of a real sailor, and boarded a train from Baltimore to New York.
He later wrote that the entire journey as he sat in the train with forged papers, his heart hammering, waiting for someone to check his documents and discover the fraud, was one of the most terrifying experiences of his life.
He made it.
3 years later, in 1841, Frederick Douglas stood up at an abolitionist meeting in Nantucket, Massachusetts, and spoke publicly for the first time about his experience as an enslaved person.
The audience was stunned.
Here was a man who had been enslaved just 3 years ago.
A man who was still technically the legal property of his enslaver under federal law standing in a hall in Massachusetts speaking with a precision and an intelligence and a controlled fury that most professional orators could not match.
People in the audience said afterward that they had never heard anything like it.
In 1845, Douglas published his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, an American slave.
It was a sensation.
It sold 30,000 copies in its first 5 years.
It was translated into multiple languages.
It was read across Europe and around the world and it destroyed one of the central arguments that slaveholders used to defend slavery.
The argument that enslaved people were not intelligent enough to govern themselves.
Here was a man who had been enslaved.
Here was his story in his words, in his own voice.
Slaveholders in the south said the book was a fraud.
They said no man who had been enslaved could write like this.
No man who had been enslaved could think like this.
They were wrong and the world knew they were wrong.
Frederick Douglas spent the rest of his life fighting.
He founded an abolitionist newspaper called the North Star in 1847.
He lectured across America and Britain.
He met with President Abraham Lincoln three times during the Civil War.
He advocated for the enlistment of black soldiers in the Union Army.
He fought for women’s suffrage.
He fought for the rights of Chinese immigrants.
He fought for anyone whose rights were being denied.
He died in 1895.
He had been born into slavery.
He died a free man.
He died having changed the world.
By 1860, the United States of America was at a breaking point.
The southern states had built an entire civilization on slavery.
Their economy, their society, their culture, their identity, all of it rested on the foundation of 4 million enslaved people.
The northern states were industrializing.
They were building factories, railroads, cities, and the moral argument against slavery.
The argument that had been building for decades, fed by people like Douglas and Tubman and thousands of others, was now too loud to ignore.
When Abraham Lincoln was elected president in November 1860, southern states began leaving the Union before he even took office.
By February 1861, seven states had secuced.
They formed the Confederate States of America.
By the time the war began in April, four more had joined them.
The Confederate vice president, Alexander Stevens, gave a speech in March of 1861, it is called the cornerstone speech.
And in it, he was absolutely clear about what the Confederacy stood for.
He said, and these are his words, “Our new government’s foundations are laid.
Its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man.
” That was the Confederacy.
That was what they fought for, not states rights.
in some abstract sense, the right to own human beings, the right to keep slavery alive.
The war lasted 4 years from 1861 to 1865.
It was the bloodiest conflict in American history.
Over 600,000 soldiers died.
More Americans died in the Civil War than in all other American wars combined.
And here is what most history books underemphasize.
180,000 black men served in the Union Army.
They fought in over 400 engagements across the war.
These were men who were enslaved or who had escaped slavery.
They volunteered to fight for a country that did not recognize them as citizens.
A country whose constitution still legally classified many of them as property.
They fought anyway because this was their country too because they were fighting for their own people, for their families, for their freedom.
On January 1st, 1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
It declared that all enslaved people in states that were in rebellion against the United States were free.
It did not free enslaved people in the border states that had stayed in the Union.
It was as much a military strategy as a moral statement.
Lincoln hoped it would weaken the Confederacy by encouraging enslaved people to flee and join the Union Army, and it worked.
But the proclamation was only paper.
Real freedom had to be won on the battlefield.
On April 9th, 1865, Confederate General Robert E.
Lee surrendered to Union General Ulissiz Srant at Appamatics Courthouse in Virginia.
The Civil War was over.
On December 6th, 1865, the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified.
It reads, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction except as a punishment for crime.
” Hold on to those words.
We will come back to them.
On June 19th, 1865, General Gordon Granger rode into Galveastston, Texas, and read out general order number three.
It said, “The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a proclamation from the executive of the United States, all slaves are free.
” This was 2 and 1/2 years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
The reason that enslaved people in Texas did not hear the news until two and a half years after Lincoln’s proclamation is still debated by historians.
Some say there were simply not enough Union troops in Texas to enforce it.
Others point to evidence that slaveholders in Texas deliberately suppressed the information to keep their workforce in place through one more cotton harvest.
2 and 1/2 years of continued slavery after it had been legally abolished.
That day, June 19th, is what we now call Junth.
4 million people were now free.
4 million people who had been legally prohibited from owning property, from being educated, from earning wages, from building any kind of material foundation for their lives.
They were free and they had nothing.
The federal government made a promise.
General William Sherman in January of 1865 issued special field order number 15.
It promised formerly enslaved people 40 acres of land from the abandoned plantations of the south.
Other resources were promised too.
The phrase that has come down through history is 40 acres and a mule.
400,000 acres of coastal land in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida were redistributed to formerly enslaved families.
But within months of Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, President Andrew Johnson, who had very different ideas about the South, reversed the order.
The land was taken back from the black families who had been given it and returned to its former Confederate owners.
The promise of 40 acres was broken.
That broken promise has echoed through American history.
For 160 years, what followed was called reconstruction.
From 1865 to 1877, the federal government made a serious attempt to rebuild the South and integrate 4 million formerly enslaved people into American society.
And for 12 years, black America built something remarkable.
Black men voted in large numbers for the first time.
Black men were elected to state legislatures across the South.
22 black men were elected to the United States Congress.
Hyram Rebels became the first black US senator in American history in 1870, taking the very Senate seat that had been held by Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy.
Black schools were built across the South.
Black literacy rates rose from near zero to over 30% in a decade.
Black communities built churches, businesses, banks, newspapers, and then it was torn down.
The Ku Klux Clan was founded in 1865 by former Confederate soldiers.
Its purpose was explicitly to restore white supremacy in the South and prevent black Americans from exercising the rights they had just been given.
Clan members murdered black- elected officials.
They burned black churches and schools.
They terrorized black communities into not voting.
They lynched black men and women as public spectacles of terror.
In 1873 in Kfax, Louisiana, a white mob attacked a group of black men who were defending the local courthouse against a disputed election result.
Over a 100 black men were killed.
Many were killed after they had already surrendered.
No one was ever meaningfully punished.
In 1877, the compromise of 1877 ended reconstruction.
It was a political deal between Republicans and Democrats to resolve the disputed presidential election of 1876.
As part of the deal, federal troops were withdrawn from the South.
Black Americans were left unprotected.
Reconstruction was over.
And what replaced it were the Jim Crow laws.
Jim Crow was a system of racial apartheid, legally mandated racial segregation covering every aspect of life.
Separate schools, separate hospitals, separate courtrooms, separate water fountains, separate sections on public buses, separate everything.
And the separation was not equal.
The black schools got the old broken desks.
The black hospitals got the underfunded wards.
The black sections of the bus were in the back.
This system, Jim Crow, lasted in its formal legal form until 1965, 100 years after emancipation, still segregated, still legally unequal.
We are now 160 years from the abolition of slavery, 60 years from the end of Jim Crow.
And the question that every honest person must ask is this, what did 400 years of slavery leave behind? The racial wealth gap in America today is one answer.
The median white family in the United States has approximately eight times the wealth of the median black family.
Eight times.
That gap did not appear out of nowhere.
It is the direct result of 246 years of unpaid labor of the broken promise of 40 acres.
Of the legal exclusion from wealthb buildinging under Jim Crowe, of the redlinining policies of the 20th century that prevented black families from buying homes in neighborhoods that were appreciating in value.
Every generation of black Americans tried to build wealth.
Every generation faced systems designed to prevent it.
The mass incarceration of black Americans today is another answer.
The United States has the largest prison population in the world.
And black Americans are incarcerated at five times the rate of white Americans.
And remember those words from the 13th amendment except as a punishment for crime.
The legal exception for slavery when crime is involved has been used to build a system of prison labor in which incarcerated people disproportionately black work for pennies an hour or for nothing at all.
The chain has changed shape.
It has not disappeared.
The health disparities, the education gap, the housing inequality, the overpolicing of black neighborhoods, the underinvestment in black communities, the way black pain has been dismissed and minimized by American institutions for four centuries.
These are not coincidences.
These are the accumulated weight of 400 years of deliberate systematic oppression.
None of this means that America has not changed.
It has changed in ways that were unimaginable 200 years ago.
In ways that people gave their lives to make possible.
But change requires understanding.
Real change.
Deep change requires looking at the full truth of what happened.
Not a sanitized version, not a comfortable version, the real version.
Because you cannot understand where America is without understanding where it came from.
And it came from this.
It came from 400 years of black slavery.
From the gold kingdoms of Africa to the auction blocks of Virginia.
From the hold of a slave ship to the cotton fields of Mississippi.
From the whip of an overseer to the terror of the clan.
That is the foundation.
That is the truth.
And it must be told.
From the great kingdoms of Africa, from Timbuktu and Mali in Congo and the Swahili coast to the chains of the Middle Passage, from the first 20 people sold in Virginia in 1619 to the 4 million who heard the news of freedom in 1865, from Nat Turner’s rebellion in the dark of a Virginia night to Harriet Tubman’s 19 journeys back into the fire.
From Frederick Douglas standing up in a hall in Nantucket and speaking the truth that silenced a room to 180,000 black soldiers fighting on the bloodiest battlefields in American history for a country that had enslaved them from the 12 years of reconstruction and what black America built in that window to the century of Jim Crow that followed and everything that had to be fought and died for all over again.
This history belongs to all of us.
Every single person alive today, whatever country they were born in, whatever language they speak, whatever their background, is living in a world that was shaped by what happened in these 400 years.
Understanding it is not a political act.
It is a human act.
It is the act of looking honestly at the world we inherited and deciding what we are going to do with what we know.
If this story opened your eyes to something you didn’t know before or deepened your understanding of something you thought you knew, please subscribe to Dark Truth because what I just told you in 50 minutes took 400 years to live through and there is so much more to tell.
Episode 2 of Dark Truth is called the African Kingdoms they erased from history.
We are going even deeper into the real history of Africa.
The kingdoms, the emperors, the scholars, the warriors, the civilization they tried to make you forget.
I need you there for that one.
I am Dark Truth.
