Psychological Implications of Slavery upon African-Americans

Introduction

Slavery occupies a central position in the social and economic organization of the Southern United States. Slavery gradually abolished in the northern states of the country in the years following the American. The slaves were used as domestic servants and in agriculture, especially in plantations of tobacco and of cotton, which required Nineteenth century as the main export crop of the country. To ban the Atlantic slave trade in 1808, the Thirteen Colonies and the United States imported about 600,000 Africans, or 5% of total slaves deported to the Americas. Before the Civil War, the U.S. censuses of 1860 established the presence of four million slaves in the country. The margin of autonomy gave birth to a unique culture that borrows from both their original African culture and that of their masters.

In the 1820s, an anti-slavery movement (small but extremely active), organized in the North and with it a support network for runaway slaves. It was this network that became famous as the Underground Railroad. Slavery is one of the main issues of political debate in the country. The Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act, stopping Scott v. Sanford the Supreme Court and the events of Bleeding Kansas are all steps in the increasing polarization around this issue. It comes as no surprise that these events contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1860. Following this conflict, the thirteenth amendment to the Federal Constitution ends slavery by extending the effects of the Emancipation Proclamation of January to the entire U.S. territory. This event took place in 1863 but failed to address the issue of the integration of African Americans in the national community. The reconstruction that follows war is thus seen to constitute a legal system of racial segregation in the South.

Descendants of African people, who arrived on the shores of North America as import for slave trade, have sustained a struggle for survival and liberation in this sector of the world for nearly four hundred years. This discussion is an injury into the African American experience for the purpose of building a conceptual framework for pastoral theology in the African American context that is adequate to the struggle of many African Americans to stay alive and be free of the oppression of racial in justice (Donna Hubbard, pp.95-106).

The often critical nature of existence, within the African American context, the concepts of survival and liberation, both concepts point to the need for pastoral theological reflection on the indigenous experience of the African American context. For the purposes of this text, what is meant by the term survival is the ability of African Americans (1) to resist systematic oppression and genocide and (2) to recover the self, which entails a psychological recovery from the abuse and dehumanization of political oppression and exploitation as well as recovery of African heritage, culture, and values that were repressed during slavery. By liberation, I mean (1) total freedom from all kinds of oppression for African ...