Slavery did not start with the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, nor did it end there. The people from the African continent have been subject to enslavement dating back to the Roman Empire. The slave markets in the medieval ages, run by Arabs and Berbers, traded millions of innocent African people captured in Slave Raids. The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, they called it. Entire nations built on the blood of enslaved African people. The so-called civilized world continued the barbaric practice of denying the right to live freely based on the color of the skin.
The greed of Berbers, Arabs, and Europeans, along with white supremacist attitudes, led to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Whenever colonialists see a new continent or country, they think about gold and wealth that can be robbed from the land. They do not admire the beauty or respect the people living there already. This principle worked reasonably well in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. However, the American continents were a different ball game altogether. The people inhabiting these lands were more unpredictable, and enslavement was quite out of the question.
The same barbaric greed led to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Several founding fathers of the “American” nation were slave owners. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Carroll, Samuel Chase, Button Gwinnett, Patrick Henry, John Jay, Richard Henry Lee, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Benjamin Rush, and Edward Rutledge were slave owners. 8 of the 12 first American Presidents were slave owners. They bought innocent people and forced them into labor in totally inexplicable conditions. These great people forcibly separated families, tortured them, and killed them at will for their amusement. All of the so-called pioneers of the American continent created their wealth by enslaving and exploiting African people. They created new slave Bibles and selectively used them to keep slaves in order and to justify their subjection to the Caucasian race.
Yet, no history book will discuss it, and no major publisher will dare allow such publications.
African American Voice is NOT one of them. We will take you through the journey of the people of Africa from the central part of their continent (modern-day Nigeria) to the infamous slave ports, treacherous voyages in which the crew killed innocent people to get the rest of their captives to behave and finally to the slave markets where they were sold like livestock. We will not be “normalizing” facts, nor will we ignore the atrocities. We will tell it like it happened. We want to bring to life the voices of the millions who remained voiceless during this time. We will tell their stories in this series of articles titled Juneteenth – The Real Story and Significance, starting today and finishing in June 2025.
We will NOT leave anything out.