Slavery to Freedom – African American History

Nimra Jilani
Los Angles Harbor College

History 012
Professor KJ Hitt
April 28th 2012
[pic]
Slavery to Freedom – African American History

The first African American arrived in the North America as servants and worked under contract from sixteenth to nineteenth century. They were brought from Africa by European Traders. In the past they were known by many names such as Negroes, Blacks and Coloureds. The term Nigger was also used for the African Americans mostly in south. More than half of the population of the African American lived in the Southern States of the America.

Slavery first began in the late 16th century When African Americans were brought to American Colonies, they were bought by white masters and they had to work on tobacco and cotton farms in the South. They were not paid anything for all their hard work and living conditions were terrible for them. Slave work was very difficult. Most African American women cooked, cleaned the house and raised the children of their white owners, where as the men were trained to become carpenter or masons but most of them remained to be farmers. Most of the African Americans lived in the South where the percentage of the slavery was at its extreme.

The racism towards the African Americans was at its extreme. A very famous historian Karl Marx stated In Wage Labor and Capital, Written twelve years before the civil war that:

“What is a negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is as good as the other. A Negro is a Negro. He only becomes a slave in certain relation. A cotton spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. It only becomes capital in certain relations. Torn away from these conditions, it as little capital as gold itself is money, or as sugar is the price of sugar.”[1]

In this statement Karl Marx does