What is the relevance of studying African American Slavery?

Originally from Sub-Sahara Africa, thousands of African Americans were kidnapped and brought over to and sold in the United States during the Atlantic Slavery Trade. By 1860, before the Civil War, 3.5 million African Americans lived as slaves, mostly in the Southern United States. More than 500,000 lived as free persons in 33 states across the United States. Today, many African Americans believed to have come from European American or Native American heritage. They believe to be direct descendants of captive Africans who were enslaved. The original Africans were not given the chance to colonize or immigrate to the United States; they were hunted down and chained together like animals, stacked on top of each other on the bottom of the ship, and sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to a life they were not accustomed to- slavery.

In the early 20th century, African Americans were still struggling for equality among whites in the workplace, education, income status, and social class. Many people are still being passed over for promotions because they are not what corporate America wants. Women have been pushed to the back of the line and given the lowest paying position resulting in double jeopardy (the subordinate status twice defined, as experienced by women of color) (Schaefer 2006). The glass ceiling, glass walls, and glass escalator (barriers that prevent the promotion of a qualified worker because of gender or race) effect has made an impact in the workplace with African American men and women as well. Whites have been given the best of everything over African Americans- positions, salary, housing, education, and political power (Berlin, 1251).

What is freedom/emancipation?

The term “emancipation” connotes the end of slavery, brought about through public authority, as distinguished from manumission, or voluntary actions taken by private individuals to relinquish claims of ownership and recognize the freedom of individual people they had owned. The American Revolution induced a first emancipation, in which, between 1780 and 1830, slavery came to an end or virtual end in every state north of the Mason-Dixon line. The Civil War produced a second emancipation, in which slavery was abolished throughout the South. The process of achieving emancipation in each region requires some description. So does the aftermath.

Whether manumission brought freedom to small numbers of individuals or emancipation ended slavery in an entire state or region, the fact that someone was no longer a slave did not in itself specify what rights, opportunities, and obligations he or she would take on. The first emancipation foreshadowed the second, for in neither period did emancipation lead immediately to full citizenship and equal opportunity. The end of slavery began a process that, over time, led to a fuller definition of legal and economic freedom, so that freedom for blacks converged with freedom for whites. Whether black freedom ever flourished to the point that it and white freedom became identical was another matter.

Slave-owners were free to dispose of their slaves in almost any manner short of maiming ...