- Mar 11, 2015
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I have refused to use sources like this because its a racist website posting racist garbage. But I do this now in order to present the disingenuous manner this topic has been presented to whites here who frequent sites like National Vanguard and others.
HERE ARE A FEW selections from Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830 by Carter G. Woodson (published in 1924), along with a few notes by me.
HERE ARE A FEW selections from Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830 by Carter G. Woodson (published in 1924), along with a few notes by me.
nationalvanguard.org
Now let's compare this to what Woodson actually wrote.
So Carter Woodson did not agree and the next. 40 pages are a list of black slaveowners and the number of slaves owned.by blacks. Please read the information.
Now lets go further.
www.theroot.com
So you see, while the comment that blacks owned slaves is true, the manner of the argument by those making the claim to dismiss white racism is dishonest. As is shown, the large majority of blacks did not purchase slaves for use as labor, but instead used the system to basically free, family members and friends. Yes, there have always been the Clarence Thomas types who thought thet could get in good with whites, so they purchased other blacks and abused them, but as the numbers show, only 13 percent of the blacks in America were free at the time Woodson wrote his book. The numbers show that out of just over 300,000 blacks, 3,776 owned slaves. At minimum 297,000 blacks did not.
There were more than 2 million slaves in America when Woodson wrote this, more than 1,996,000 of them were owned by whites. Therefore trying to make black and white slave ownership equivalent is disingenuous.
HERE ARE A FEW selections from Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830 by Carter G. Woodson (published in 1924), along with a few notes by me.
HERE ARE A FEW selections from Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830 by Carter G. Woodson (published in 1924), along with a few notes by me.
That much I already knew. Among the free Negroes who ran plantations and owned slaves were Cecile Richards and Antoine Dubuclet of Louisiana, around the middle of the 19th century.This statistical report on the free Negro ownership of slaves was made possible in 1921 when the Director of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History obtained from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial an appropriation for the support of research into certain neglected aspects of Negro History. This special report, however, was not the objective of the Research Department of the Association. It developed rather as a by-product. In compiling statistics for the much larger report on Free Negro Heads of Families in the United States in 1830, the investigators found so many cases of Negroes owning slaves that it was decided to take special notice of this phase of the History of the free Negro….
The aim of this report on the free Negro is to facilitate the further study of this neglected group. Most of these people have been forgotten, for persons supposedly well-informed in history are surprised to learn today that about a half million, almost one-seventh of the Negroes of this country, were free prior to the emancipation in 1865. It is hardly believed that a considerable number of Negroes were owners of slaves themselves, and in some cases controlled large plantations.
Which is as I would expect. Blacks like to claim that when Blacks owned slaves, they did so only for humanitarian reasons, for “good” reasons, which justified the “technical” slave status of whomever had been purchased. But the truth is that Blacks used slavery to apply pressure or punishment on others. For example:Slaves of Negroes were in some cases the children of a free father who had purchased his wife. If he did not thereafter emancipate the mother, as so many such husbands failed to do, his own children were born his slaves and were thus reported by the enumerators.
Some of these husbands were not anxious to liberate their wives immediately. They considered it advisable to put them on probation for a few years, and if they did not find them satisfactory they would sell their wives as other slaveholders disposed of Negroes. For example, a Negro shoemaker in Charleston, South Carolina, purchased his wife for $700; but, on finding her hard to please, he sold her a few months thereafter for $750, gaining $50 by the transaction.

Blacks in America Owned Black Slaves
by David Sims HERE ARE A FEW selections from Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830 by Carter G. Woodson (published in 1924), along with a few notes by me. This statistical report on the free Negro ownership of slaves was made possible in 1921 when

Now let's compare this to what Woodson actually wrote.
Benevolent Negroes often purchased slaves to make their lot easier by granting them their freedom for a nominal sum, or by permitting them to work it out on liberal terms. John Barry Meachum, a Negro Baptist minister in St. Louis, thus came into possession of as many as 20 slaves by 1836. The exploitation type of Negro slaveholder, moreover, sometimes feeling the sting of conscience, liberated his slaves. Thus did Samuel Gibson, a Negro of Mississippi, in 1844, when he brought his six slaves to Cincinnati, Ohio, and settled them on free territory. Practically all of these Negro slaveholders were in the South.
Slavery, however, at that time had not been exterminated altogether in the North, and even there the Negro was following in the footsteps of the white man, as this report will show. In the South where almost all of the Negro slaveholders were found, moreover, we find some of them competing with the large planters in the number of slaves they owned. Most of such Negro proprietors lived in Louisiana, South Carolina, Maryland and Virginia, as did the majority of all such slave owners. There are, moreover, a few instances of confusing absentee ownership with Negro ownership. Sometimes a free Negro had charge of a plantation, but did not own the slaves himself, and the enumerator returned him as the owner of the slaves.
Excepting those of Louisiana, one may say that most of the Negro owners of slaves lived in urban communities. In those parts of the South where the influence of the kind planter near the coast was not felt the Negro owner of slaves did not frequently appear. The free Negroes themselves, moreover, encountered such difficulties in the lower South and Southwest that they had to seek more hospitable communities in free States. By 1840 the trend toward degrading the free Negro to a lower status had become evident even in the apparently benevolent slaveholding States. Just before the outbreak of the Civil War the free Negro was receiving practically no consideration in the South and very little in the North. History here repeats itself, then, in showing the varying attitude of the whites toward the blacks in the cycles of national development.
So Carter Woodson did not agree and the next. 40 pages are a list of black slaveowners and the number of slaves owned.by blacks. Please read the information.
Now lets go further.
How Many Slaves Did Blacks Own?
So what do the actual numbers of black slave owners and their slaves tell us? In 1830, the year most carefully studied by Carter G. Woodson, about 13.7 percent (319,599) of the black population was free. Of these, 3,776 free Negroes owned 12,907 slaves, out of a total of 2,009,043 slaves owned in the entire United States, so the numbers of slaves owned by black people over all was quite small by comparison with the number owned by white people. In his essay, " 'The Known World' of Free Black Slaveholders," Thomas J. Pressly, using Woodson's statistics, calculated that 54 (or about 1 percent) of these black slave owners in 1830 owned between 20 and 84 slaves; 172 (about 4 percent) owned between 10 to 19 slaves; and 3,550 (about 94 percent) each owned between 1 and 9 slaves. Crucially, 42 percent owned just one slave.
Pressly also shows that the percentage of free black slave owners as the total number of free black heads of families was quite high in several states, namely 43 percent in South Carolina, 40 percent in Louisiana, 26 percent in Mississippi, 25 percent in Alabama and 20 percent in Georgia. So why did these free black people own these slaves?
It is reasonable to assume that the 42 percent of the free black slave owners who owned just one slave probably owned a family member to protect that person, as did many of the other black slave owners who owned only slightly larger numbers of slaves. As Woodson put it in 1924's Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830, "The census records show that the majority of the Negro owners of slaves were such from the point of view of philanthropy. In many instances the husband purchased the wife or vice versa … Slaves of Negroes were in some cases the children of a free father who had purchased his wife. If he did not thereafter emancipate the mother, as so many such husbands failed to do, his own children were born his slaves and were thus reported to the numerators."
Moreover, Woodson explains, "Benevolent Negroes often purchased slaves to make their lot easier by granting them their freedom for a nominal sum, or by permitting them to work it out on liberal terms." In other words, these black slave-owners, the clear majority, cleverly used the system of slavery to protect their loved ones.

Did Black People Own Slaves?
For those who are wondering about the retro title of this black history series, please take a moment to learn about historian Joel A. Rogers

So you see, while the comment that blacks owned slaves is true, the manner of the argument by those making the claim to dismiss white racism is dishonest. As is shown, the large majority of blacks did not purchase slaves for use as labor, but instead used the system to basically free, family members and friends. Yes, there have always been the Clarence Thomas types who thought thet could get in good with whites, so they purchased other blacks and abused them, but as the numbers show, only 13 percent of the blacks in America were free at the time Woodson wrote his book. The numbers show that out of just over 300,000 blacks, 3,776 owned slaves. At minimum 297,000 blacks did not.
There were more than 2 million slaves in America when Woodson wrote this, more than 1,996,000 of them were owned by whites. Therefore trying to make black and white slave ownership equivalent is disingenuous.