Black on Black Crime

On November 2, 2010 a group of my peers alerted me to a topic and not even heard of before. It's strange to think that this could have even existed, they say anything is possible. But the thought of African-Americans, blacks OWNING other blacks is barely within my reach. Their study focused mainly on slaves of the North and South Carolina, but that was enough to tickle my fancy. That first thought most would have is that the Black slave owners simply "owned" their friends and families. Those black slave owners simply bought freedom for other slaves and by the legal definition, they were slave owners. However, according to the research, those black slave owners "owned" their family as well as other slaves for the purpose of financial gain. The only thing different from white and black slave owners was their skin color as a lot of black slave owners were as cruel as their white counterparts. You would think that the common ancestry would beg the idea of benevolence, but it didn't. Perhaps the black slave owners felt they needed to be cruel to garner the respect the white slave owners probably received automatically. I'm not sure because I wasn't there, but I imagine that I would be more bother by a black man beating me than a white man. This person was supposed to be my brother. However, one of my group members brought up a valid point when he stated, "It's not a surprise there were black slave owners. It was black people that sold other blacks to whites in the first place. They captured their own, locked them in shackles, and guided them on the ships that brought them here." When considering that truth, the idea of black slave holders is not so crazy.

Alexandria Igwe