Summary Of Slavery By Howard Zinn

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Slavery Howard Zinn Ch. 2 Paper Slavery can be traced all the way back to 1619. This is when one of the first ships came over to Jamestown, Virginia, which is one of the first established colonies. Twenty slaves were boarded on a ship, in horrible conditions, just to land in the Americas where they would become slaves. Enslaving people and treating them like things because of their race or religion is unjust to the human person. When these first slaves arrived, they weren't officially given the title of slaves, but instead servants. Servants were thriving during this time because there was such a demand for people to help with labor and farming fields. Even though both whites and blacks were servants, it is believed that blacks were …show more content…

When they were getting ready to be sold, they would have marches for several miles and some of them would be shackled around the neck. Once they reached the coast of where they would board ships, the slaves would be put into cages just like animals are today. After boarding the ships, they were cramped in so tight that hundreds of them would die because they would not being able to breath. Inhuman conditions like these went on for thousands of year. Incidents such as running away or sleeping with a black slave would appear during this time. If a group of white and black slaves ran away the black slaves would get a more severe punishment than the white ones would. If a white slave slept with a black slave, once again the black slave would have a more treacherous punishment. Slaves were treated unfairly, but black slaves got the worse end of it compared to any other slave. During the 1600s, the colonists technology was superior to the Indians, but the Indians thought that the colonists technology was unnecessary. Both the Europeans and the Indians had their own land and way of live. The Indians were people that lived off the land with less labor. In order for the colonists to be taken serious and to cut down the amount of labor they were doing, they would begin to buy and sell black slaves. This wasn't challenging for them to do because the blacks were in a foreign area, and they were