Growing Up African American

The one common background of African Americans is our Antebellum Slave heritage. The Antebellum Slavery Institution of the Early American South was not a part of most Southern Caucasian families lives. Only 5% of whites living in the South owned slaves in 1850.  There were 8, 039,000 Caucasians living in fifteen Slaves States in 1850, only 384,884 people owned slaves. The average number of slaves on most slave holdings varied between ten and fifty. There were about four million slaves in the South at the start of the “War Between the States”.

However slavery on these few plantations changed the social and cultural legacy of African Americans forever. The Antebellum Slave culture of Early America has deeply influenced the psyche of modern African Americans.

Antebellum Slavery was not a benign institution as many historians tend to portray it, some slave-owners may have been more humanitarian than others.

We may not want to forget that slaves were deprived of their individual freedoms, they were held against their will, they were denied the opportunity to set their own destiny unlike many other cultures of Early America. Slavery was brutal, hundreds of thousands and many estimate state that millions of Africans loss their lives during the voyage from Africa across the Atlantic Ocean to America, due to disease, suicide, and homicide. Hundreds of thousands of addition slaves were murdered in the South on plantations and the countryside trying to escape the binding chains of slavery. This was our “Holocaust”. Slavery was an intense psychological assault on the African captives of this institution.

Imagine yourself being lead around on a chain like a mogul dog, standing on a podium, frighten like a lost child, surrounded by hundreds of people. You are alone not able to communicate with anyone around you. The smell of human sweat, urine and stool burn your nostrils like hot searing coals. You are naked, sweating with chains around your neck, wrist, and ankles. Strange people are touching you like you are an inanimate object, inspecting you like a common farm animal. They fondle your breast, chest and buttocks, opening your mouth to look at your teeth, putting their dirty hands on your legs and arms to squeeze your muscles to determine your worth as a work animal and finally buying you for about eleven hundred dollars.

This was the horror experienced by slaves at a slave market. This was the beginning of their social and cultural undoing.  Slavery was not kind or good in anyway.

Antebellum Slavery unlike Old World Slavery did not allow the slaves to maintain their original cultures. The Greek and Roman Empire allowed people enslaved by their armies to maintain their original cultures. The Old World Slave system allowed slaves to maintain their family marriage traditions, family structure, religion, customs, commerce and their basic social conduct. Antebellum Slavery however did not allow African slaves to maintain their marriage traditions, family structure, religion, history, heritage, customs, diet and social conduct. Antebellum Slavery replaced their African captors cultures with a new derogatory culture. African slaves were forced to adopt new behaviors, foreign to their original cultures.