The Untold Truth About Slavery – by Ed Achorn

By Edward Achorn, Exploring the Story of America

(Editor’s Note: The Untold Truth About Slavery is the first of several articles from different perspectives on Black history planned by RINewsToday – we thank Ed Achorn for allowing this publication.)

Last week, Tim Kaine made a ludicrous statement: “The United States didn’t inherit slavery from anybody. We created it.”

It is shocking to hear a U.S. senator, a former Virginia governor and a former major-party candidate for vice president spout such nonsense, particularly at a time when racial tensions have been ratcheted up, with rioters looting and burning neighborhoods.

Even a cursory reading of world history would reveal that America did not create the institution of slavery (though North America’s colonies permitted it to take hold here). Slavery goes back many thousands of years.

And Africans have not been the only victims. Virtually every human culture has embraced it, in huge numbers, notably including China and India. It existed in the Americas — practiced widely and with awful brutality by indigenous peoples — before Christopher Columbus arrived. In the ancient world (see the second century mosaic of Roman slave servants above), slavery was ubiquitous. Jews were famously enslaved in Egypt, and led from bondage by Moses.

Slavery exists around the world now, disgracefully tolerated. National Geographic estimates some 27 million people are still held in bondage.

As the great economist Thomas Sowell has noted (see his “The Real History of Slavery”), at least 1 million white people were enslaved by North African pirates between 1500 and 1800. The very word slave derives from Slav — white Europeans who were enslaved.

The monstrous African slave trade involved the sale of prisoners of war taken in tribal battles, greatly enriching some African leaders and tribes. I suspect few people know that only a small fraction of the black slaves sent to the New World went to North America.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., a professor in Harvard’s Department of African and African American studies, explained…

Click here to read the complete article: https://bit.ly/31JsUfi

_______________

Ed Achorn’s blog is Exploring the Story of America.

Edward Achorn is the author of two critically acclaimed books of baseball history — The Summer of Beer and Whiskey and Fifty-Nine in ’84 — in addition to his celebrated new book, Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln. He is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and recipient of the Yankee Quill Award for lifetime achievement in journalism.

Most recently Achorn was Vice President and Editorial Pages Editor of The Providence Journal.

Follow his blog at: https://edachorn.com