When I was a little girl, I believed everything I was taught in school. For example, I believed that Christopher Columbus discovered America. I believed the colonists who followed Chris to America were kind to the indigenous Indians they “discovered” upon landing their ships in America. Heck, in grade school, we were taught that the people who first came to America from Europe were kind, loving, God-fearing people.
The reality is, you can’t believe in fairy tales forever, and you certainly can’t remain a child forever. One day you grow up, and you start learning history that was never taught to you in school.
What you learn is that Christopher Columbus did not discover America, number one. At the time of Christopher Columbus’s voyages to America, the Americas were already inhabited by Indigenous Americans. Soon after first contact, Eurasian diseases such as smallpox began to devastate the indigenous populations. Chris Columbus was involved in brutally treating and enslaving Native Americans in the range of thousands.
If you really want to know what the founding fathers of America thought about Africans in America, who they forced here, just revisit some of the wording in the Constitution of the United States.
Article One, Section Two of the Constitution of the United States declared that any person who was not free would be counted as three-fifths of a free individual for the purposes of determining congressional representation. The “three-fifths” clause thus increased the political power of slaveholding states. It did not, however, make any attempt to ensure that the interest of slaves would be represented in the government. In short, what the Constitution said was that the founding fathers considered slaves less than fully human. The three-fifths clause remained in force until the post-Civil War 13th Amendment freed all, …
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