Juneteenth Day

By Azalia Rosas

Slave trading began with the Portuguese; it then spread, eventually reaching the New World. Those of us raised in the US will probably know this and will have studied it practically every year for most of our pre-collegiate education.

The Caribbean and South America received over 90 percent of those who survived the Middle Passage. Although what is now the US only received 6 percent of all kidnapped Africans who were brought to the Americas, a quarter of all Africans in the New World were in US plantations by 1825.

Men, women, and children worked. Raised like livestock, they worked to the bone and even after that. This is a dark time in US history; and then, Abraham Lincoln.

A United States Plantation

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