It's a history that Portugal & Brazil would like to forget. By the time Brazil abolished slavery in 1888 they had imported 4.9 million slaves from 1501 to 1866 from the Congo Angola region of Africa.By contrast there were 350,000 slaves brought into the 13 colonies of the U.S. I watched a doco last night on this sad piece of history.
I didn't even know Brazil had slaves...wow!! 4.9 million ...shame on me for not knowing that.!! Do you have a link to the story?
@Joy Martin Ahhh....., Joy, the history books! Again, who writes them, and in finality who winds up being even allowed to read them? And, are they written to coincide with events happening as they happened? IOW, might they be written under the guidance of those controlling public media, in order to further enhance their present agenda? Did ANY history book provided to, say, students in school, reveal the founding fathers OWNED SLAVES? Doubt it. Difficult to trust the history books. Frank
I am thinking that most early histories of the country may not have mentioned it, but that the exclusion was not of the reasons you might suspect. In the early histories, it wasn't considered consequential that a man owned slaves, given that the practice long preceded the creation of the United States as a nation. I have a history book that was published when the country was about a hundred years old. Published in 1878, the book was put together not long after the Civil War, when one might think that slavery would have been an issue. Entitled, A CONDENSED SCHOOL HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, the book was clearly used in the schools, as it comes complete with 140-year-old doodles from schoolchildren and other scribbles. On the subject of our presidents up until that time, the book strictly holds to their presidential administrations, reporting on the issues and actions of consequence that took place during their times in office but does not examine their personal lives.
The book includes a section on the causes of the War of Secession, as it refers to the Civil War. Although published in New York and Chicago, the history deals with the causes of the Civil War more fairly than more modern history texts do, taking pains to consider that there were two sides to the issues. On the causes of the War of Secession, the issue of slavery is not the first mentioned. It discusses a growing antagonism between the North and the South that began with the Buchanan Administration, as well as a difference of opinion, largely along geographical lines, as to whether the Federal Union was a league or a confederation, which might be dissolved at the wish of the respective States. It lists the issue of free trade as a central issue for the South, while the industrial States in the North wanted protective tariffs. Slavery is named as the issue in which the North and South were most sharply divided. While acknowledging that slavery existed in the North as well, the economy of the agricultural South was more dependent upon it than the industrial North. Of course, it discusses the Missouri Compromise, the Fugitive Slave Act, and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. According to the history text, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise led to the creation of the Republican Party, whose principle doctrine was opposition to the extension of slavery. Then there was the violence in the Kansas Territory. The presidential campaign of 1856 was the first time that slavery was made part of a political campaign, when the Republican candidate, John C. Fremont made slavery a significant part of his campaign. Although the Democrat candidate, James Buchanan, won the election, Fremont had come a lot closer than people had expected, given that the Republican Party was a new political party. In 1857, the Supreme Court heard the Missouri Compromise case, determining that it was unconstitutional, and that slave owners could take their slaves with them to any state in the Union. Some Northern States passed Personal Liberty laws, declaring freedom for slaves within their borders. Although most people in the North condemned the actions of John Brown in the fall of 1859, for which he was hanged, many people in the South regarded his raid to be a natural result of the Free Soil doctrines of some Northern States. Then, of course, things came to a head with the election of the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, in 1860. The text discusses the efforts that were made by both Northern and Southern leaders to prevent a dissolution of the Union, including a few pages leading up to firing on Fort Sumter and the beginning of the war itself. I was struck by the fairly neutral tone adopted by this history book on the Civil War, given that it had been over for only 14 years at the time that it was published. It was certainly a more neutral stance than the one that I was subjected to as a student in Michigan schools a hundred years later.
I have been watching a doco on RECONSTRUCTION that I find fascinating. It has filled in a few gaps of my education. http://www.ushistory.org/us/35.asp
We visited my grandparents a lot in the South. One of my earliest memories was waiting for a bus with my grandmother to go downtown. I saw a bus coming and started yelling, "Here comes our bus!" My grandmother said, "No, honey, that's the n_____ bus (a word that was NOT used by my parents, so I wasn't sure what she was talking about); we're waiting for the White bus." And when the bus came, it was blue. I couldn't figure why it was called the white bus. This was circa 1950-1951. Definitely pre-civil rights. My grandparents definitely used that language.
To tell the truth, when I was a lad I didn’t know there was an issue in the realm of civil rights. I had gone to schools in New Orleans, Iowa and Florida and didn’t experience any substantial difference except for the basic cultural aspects that are presently seen. Outside the schools, yes, the majority of Negros did go to separate restaurants and live in separate communities and perhaps they even sat at the back of the city buses but I wouldn’t know because I never took a city bus by that point in life. The thing is, I saw nearly the same thing in the north as I saw in the south. Now, it’s a given that all towns and cities in Louisiana aren’t the same in a racial sense and certainly aren’t the same as it was and is in New Orleans because that city is filled with people from different backgrounds and cultures. Cajuns, Creoles, Bougalis not to even go into the foreign cultures of Greece, China, Russia etc. I do guess that the biggest difference occurred when I started working in the restaurants. Caucasians dominated the front of a restaurant and everyone else worked in the kitchen or tended bar. But then, when I worked in a restaurant later on in Iowa, the same thing was going on there and that was in the 80’s. Funny, but when I went to school in S. Florida, our teacher came forward one day and explained to us that we were going to have 3 new students join us on the following day. She also explained that these children were different and we should accept them and treat them the same as everyone else in the class. It seemed that nearly everyone in the class was looking around trying to figure out what kind of kids were they that would be so different than us. We had caucasians, blacks and even a couple of twins from China so what possible difference could there be? The 3 kids did indeed show up the next day. They were Seminole Indians. Imagine that, Native American Florida originals being deemed as “different”. Perhaps if the teacher hadn’t made it a point to set up the mental image that those children were different, we probably would not have even given it a second thought other than they were new to the class.
My paternal grand parents lived in Norfolk, Va. My grandmother was the most christian woman that you ever would care to meet. She had bible studies at her house twice a week.One for the white women and one for "my colored ladies". Her best friend was an old black woman that lived in a tiny house (long before the modern concept). I never knew how Miss Dorothy came to be there,just that my grandfather had built her this little cabin on the back of their property. Even with blacks being welcome in her home socially( an anomaly for the time and place), she still had no reservations about throwing out the n word in conversation and referring to any and all black guys as boy. I tend and like to think that this was not so much active racism,but was just the norm for the time, of course I was not the one being denigrated.
Although I had always attended Integrated Schools and lived in Integrated Neighborhoods it was the military during the Korean War that I first met Hard Core Racists. They were guys from the Southern states that delighted in calling me YANKEE even though I was from California. They were still fighting the Civil War.
Although I grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and not the South, racist language was common throughout the 1950s, and into the early 1960s. Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Moe didn't end well, for example, and you never knew what people would find in a woodpile.