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Ivan G Thompson
a book bubble about
The Making of a Great America Where the Church and the Founding Fathers Fell Short
Religion & Spirituality
Author Insight
NEWSFLASH! Slavery Wasn't Racist
I recently watched a CNN special on “Black Wall Street” about the massacre of at least 100 black people in Greenwood, Oklahoma. I’d researched it and wrote about it in one of my books. But during the special, I learned that the Indians who were forcibly marched during “The Trail of Tears” took their slaves with them. That’s how so many blacks in Oklahoma became landowners after the Civil War. When the war was over, these Indian Tribes, who fought on the side of the Confederacy, were given lands. The emancipated slaves were too. I NEVER knew that. We weren’t taught in school that Indians owned slaves or that black slaves were on “The Trail of Tears.” So you can imagine my disgust when I saw this headline: “Texas bill to ban teaching of critical race theory puts teachers on front lines of culture war over how history is taught.” There’s a push in a lot of Republican-led states like FL, TX, etc., to separate the Founding Fathers from slavery, slavery from racism, and race from post-slavery denials of voting rights, lynchings, segregation. As a life-long Republican voter, I emphasized Republican. More and more, the party has identified itself with vile things like this and the Proud Boys, etc. How can slavery based on skin color not be racist?
Book Excerpt
The Making of a Great America Where the Church and the Founding Fathers Fell Short
This is an excerpt from the chapter entitled "You Can 'Steal' Our Dirty Jobs"
Slavery, one of the most horrific blights on America’s great history, expanded primarily because the exploitation of forced immigrant labor was a cheap path to prosperity.
“The rebellion had also taken place in the midst of a fundamental shift in Virginia's labor force, several decades after leading planters had collectively decided to replace white indentured servants with more easily controlled enslaved Africans, but roughly twenty years before the supply of slaves would make that possible. By 1700 the slave population had soared, British immigration had slowed, and many poor whites had either become better established or had departed the colony. At the turn of the century white Virginians were increasingly united by white populism, or the binding together of rich and poor whites through their sense of what they considered their common racial virtue and their common opposition to the interests of Indians and enslaved Africans. Thus Bacon's Rebellion was, as one writer has put it, a critical element in "the origin of the Old South." (Rice, 2014)
To ensure that this cheap source of labor would remain in place, “slave codes” were instituted across the then colonies as early as the 17th Century. Slave codes were “the set of rules based on the concept that slaves were property, not persons.” The codes were “amplified with laws by the slave owners to protect not only the property but also the property owner from the danger of slave violence.” (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2018)
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