{"id":42899,"date":"2018-04-02T05:00:23","date_gmt":"2018-04-02T09:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=42899"},"modified":"2018-04-01T15:09:50","modified_gmt":"2018-04-01T19:09:50","slug":"african-american-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/04\/02\/african-american-history\/","title":{"rendered":"African-American history"},"content":{"rendered":"

At According to Hoyt<\/em>, Amanda S. Green<\/a> is doing a deep dive on Thomas Sowell\u2019s book Black Rednecks and White Liberals<\/em>. In this installment, she discusses the history of African-Americans from first arrival in the early 1600s to the post bellum<\/em> exodus from former slave states to the northern cities:<\/p>\n

If you were to ask most anyone how African-Americans first came to the United States, you\u2019d be told they came as slaves. Thanks to our schools and public misconception, we are not taught about those who came as indentured servants. Of course, we aren\u2019t taught about the whites who came over in similar circumstances. To be honest, it is something I learned the hard way when I was in school too many years ago to count. I made the mistake of asking about indentured servants in a history class and being told such things hadn\u2019t existed here in the States, at least not for whites. Funny, I have the original handwritten advertisement that had to be published notifying the people of New Jersey that my own ancestors had fulfilled the terms of their indenture and were now free persons.<\/p>\n

That is a part of our history, be you speaking about black or white history, we have chosen to forget. Unfortunately, that has led to more than a little \u201cconfusion\u201d about our nation and problems we still encounter today.<\/p>\n

The first misconception that needs to be shattered is that blacks first came to America as slaves. That\u2019s wrong. The first Africans brought to Colonial Virginia in 1619 came as indentured servants, a status shared by a number of whites. (BRAWL, pg. 41) This status of being \u201cindentured\u201d meant they could work off their indenture or buy it out. Once they had, they became free persons. The first law recognizing perpetual slavery was passed in 1661 in Virginia. (Note, this is part of the \u201cred neck\u201d sector of what would become the United States. More on that later.)<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Many of the issues caused by this mass migration to the North came about because of the differences between the \u201cfree people of color\u201d native to the North and those moving there. The northern \u201cfree people of color\u201d were more literate and more urbanized than their Southern counterparts. In 1850, most free people of color in the North were literate while most slaves were not. It would take 50 years for most people of color to become literate or, to put it into context, two generations. Urbanization didn\u2019t really occur until 1940. As Sowell notes, the \u201csize of the free black population increased after the United States came into existence as an independent nation, as the ideology of freedom associated with the American revolution led most Northern states to abolish slavery, and even in the South, enough white slave owners freed their slaves to cause the free black population there to nearly double and then redouble between 1790 and 1810.<\/em>\u201d (BRAWL, pg. 41)<\/p>\n