By Sandra Lowen

There have “always” been enslaved peoples in the history of the world. The slavery of the Israelites and of Africans have been considered among the most heinous, however, because of their severity.

Unlike the Israelites, who were made slaves in their own or neighboring countries, Africans were carried far away across a great ocean, where nothing was familiar to them. Israelites and the Egyptians who enslaved them did not look that dissimilar, while the Africans, with their dark skin and other prominent racial features, stood out among the people around them.

Although they were ostracized from Egyptian society, there is no record of the Israelites being deprived of family, religion, language, or culture. However, African slave families were purposefully separated and placed with other Africans who did not speak their language. Learning to read or showing those skills was punishable, in a significant number of incidents, by death. Whippings and forcible rapes were a matter of course.

How were Christian White people able to do such contemptible things? They went to the Scriptures and dredged up the story of Ham, Noah’s second son, whose offspring Noah cursed to be slaves to their relatives. White religious people designated Ham to be a Black man, destined by God to be a slave to justify their treatment of the Africans.

But even this was not enough. Ultimately, they labeled the Black race as “beasts,” who, like other animals, could be beaten and maltreated. Some “studded” their slaves, forcing them to have sex even with close relatives or with the owners themselves. In the latter cases, the mixed-race offspring were not acknowledged as a part of the White family, but were banished to the slave quarters with the rest of the Blacks.

When changing political and social pressures made it no longer easy to bring slaves to America, the Whites coupled with Black women, willing or not, to make more slave offspring. At auction, these mulatto and quadroon children sold for a higher price than their black-skinned half-brothers.

Many people called for slaves to be treated better, but they were shouted down. Ultimately, in political circles, it was allowed for a Black man to count as having the value of three-fifths of a White man. Independence Day — July 4, 1776 — granted neither freedom nor citizenship to Africans in America. A slave might be freed for extraordinary service to his master or upon his owner’s death. However, there was no guarantee, even with legal papers attesting he was free, that an African might not be recaptured by “slavecatchers” and returned to servitude without recourse.

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