Author Archives: nomad

The first documented “20 and Odd” Blacks that arrived in Jamestown, Virginia in August of 1619 are not known to have been immediately enslaved.

Almost from the beginning there was a bifurcation of the black population in America.  The blacks who came to America in colonial times were divided into two distinct categories. The social status of one group was fundamentally different from that of the other (Porter 1943:4). One of those groups, the “elite”, has traditionally been much smaller in number than the other, but nevertheless extremely important. The larger group has always been the underclass. Elite blacks generally have had certain limited rights, similar, though rarely equal,  to those of European immigrants of the same economic rung. The underclass has had much fewer rights and, at times, none at all. A dichotomy. What was the basis of this differential treatment? Skin color? Not entirely. And not initially.
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