It’s the sort of headline at which many will roll their eyes and dismiss as ludicrous, particularly since the article in reference was written by a semi high-profile Christian. The fact that the writer is a black man, Ben Kinchlow who for years co-hosted the 700 Club with Pat Robertson, should lend credence to the story, but it won’t. It seems today that blacks who don’t subscribe to the victimhood paradigm spoon-fed to the African-American community are immediately labeled “Uncle Toms,” not to be trusted.
For those with a more robust command of U.S. & world history, slavery has always been a subject that goes way beyond race. Today’s din of cries for “social justice” and even “reparations for descendant of black slaves,” the likes of which have been provoked by liberals such as Barack Obama, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Jeremiah Wright to point a few well-deserved fingers, is kept going by the misconceptions that slavery was and is an institution created by white devils who torture and oppress hapless blacks and other minorities. Such is not and has never been (exclusively) the case.
Whites and blacks, sticking with the two galvanized races of the issue, have both had a hand in the evil practice of man-stealing, i.e. kidnapping for the purposes of indentured servitude.
Early in the annuls of American history is recorded how black Muslims on the Barbary Coast of Africa earned their place in infamy for attacking American merchant ships and kidnapping seamen to enslave and/or hold them for ransom, spawning the First Barbary War (1801-1805)
African tribesmen are also well known for enslaving fellow tribes on their own continent and even selling their enslaved captives to traders who supplied the west with their “product.”
According to the World News Daily column by Mr. Kinchlow, assuming it is reliable, it would seem that a black man played a large part in establishing the American system of early colonial slavery. Briefly and without muddling through all the legalese, Mr. Kinchlow asserts that a black man named Anthony Johnson, with shrewd manipulation of a court in Northampton, Virginia was able to convince the judge to grant him “ownership” of another black named John Casor in March of the year 1654.
Kinchlow concludes:
This is apparently the first legal sanction of slavery (not for a crime) in the New World. Johnson – who had himself been captured in Angola and brought to America as an indentured servant – was a black man. From evidence found in the earliest legal documents, Anthony Johnson must be recognized as the nation’s first official legal slaveholder. The father of legalized slavery in America was a black man. Do we celebrate that as part of Black History Month?
Mr. Kinchlow’s research appears thorough and the references can be supported by doing some searching on one’s own.
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