1Yasuke
Yasuke was a 16th century African who traveled to Japan as a slave. He caused such a sensation that a powerful warlord wished to see him. He thought his black skin was paint and ordered it to be scrubbed. However, they became friends and Yasuke was later given the prestigious rank of Samurai.
2. Only 388,000 slaves out of a total 12.5 million that crossed the Atlantic were sold in the US. The rest (10.7 million) went to Mexico and South America.
3. Eunus was a slave-magician who joked on the stage that he planned to overthrow Roman rule and become king of Sicily. He later led a huge slave uprising and kept his promise to spare the lives of those who left him tips.
4. When former slave Jordan Anderson was asked to come back and work for his old master, he replied with a deadpan letter asking for 52 years' back pay as proof of good faith. The letter has been described as a rare example of documented "slave humor" of the period.
5. Abram Gannibal was a black African-born Russian nobleman of the 18th century. Sold into slavery, he was eventually freed by Peter the Great and adopted into the Emperor's household as his godson. His great-great-grandson is the celebrated author and poet Alexander Pushkin.
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6Elizabeth Freeman
In 1780, a slave named Elizabeth Freeman essentially ended slavery in Massachusetts by suing for her freedom on the basis that the new state constitution declared that all men are born free and equal.
7. Female slaves in the American South would chew on the cotton root to abort a pregnancy, decreasing the reproduction of more slave children.
8. Samuel McCulloch, a freed slave, was the first Texian soldier to be wounded during the Texas Revolution, in 1835. A law later prohibited freed slaves from residing in the Republic of Texas but specifically excluded McCulloch, his family, and his descendants in recognition of his service.
9. Henry "Box" Brown successfully escaped slavery in 1849 by mailing himself in a wood crate from Virginia to the free state of Pennsylvania.
10. Bill Richmond was a black slave who fought alongside the British during the Revolutionary War. He later moved to England where he became one of the world's most famous bare-knuckle boxers. An articulate, respected man, he married a white woman and attended George IV’s coronation.
11Quilombo Dos Palmares
Quilombo Dos Palmares was a community of fugitive slaves in Brazil that resisted Portuguese efforts to destroy it for almost a century. One estimate places the population of Palmares in the 1690s at around 20,000 inhabitants.
12. William “Billy” Lee was George Washington’s slave and personal valet. He fought alongside Washington through the entire American Revolutionary War and was the only slave of Washington's who was emancipated immediately upon his death.
13. Before the Mayflower, Squanto was kidnapped, sold into slavery in Spain, and escaped back to North America, only to find his entire tribe wiped out from disease. The site he later helped the Pilgrams settle at was the summer village of his tribe, Plymoth Rock.
14. Roman slaves wore collars of iron with messages like a modern dog collar, for example, this one, which reads "I have run away; hold me. When you shall have returned me to my master, Zoninus, you will receive a solidus."
15. Mary Bowser was a freed slave with a Quaker education and a photographic memory, posed as a slow-witted slave to spy for the Union in Confederate President Jefferson Davis' household through much of the Civil War.
16Wheeling Gaunt
Wheeling Gaunt was a slave who bought his and his family's freedom in 1845 before moving to Yellow Springs, Ohio. At the time of his death, he bequeathed a large portion of his land and estate to the village under the condition that each widow be given flour annually, which continues to this day.
17. An African slave named Onesimus taught colonists in Boston how to inoculate themselves against smallpox. The treatment had been common in China and Africa for centuries.
18. In 1851 was a runaway slave named Jerry was arrested in Syracuse, New York during the anti-slavery Liberty Party's convention. A crowd of hundreds of abolitionists broke into the city jail and freed Jerry, eventually smuggling him to Canada. Nine participants in the rescue also fled to avoid prosecution.
19. William Ellis was a Texas-born slave who crossed the border to slavery-free Mexico and became a millionaire. Later on, he attempted to bring African Americans to Mexico and even served as a diplomat of the US to the King of Ethiopia.
20. An escaped slave of George Washington, Oney Judge lived her life as a fugitive in New Hampshire and provided historians the most detailed account of slavery at Mount Vernon.
21Solomon Northup
Solomon Northup, a free African American living in New York in the 1800s, was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the south. As a slave, he had no way to testify his case. He remained a slave for 12 years before finally being freed. He then wrote a memoir “Twelve Years A Slave.”
22. Sara Forbes Bonetta was a West African who was orphaned, sold into slavery, and in a remarkable twist of events, was liberated from enslavement and became a goddaughter to Queen Victoria.
23. Lewis Williams was an escaped slave who managed to evade recapture by switching with a body double at his crowded trial and then crossdressing as a woman to flee town. He was aided by a reverend, who dressed him up as his “daughter” with a veil and bonnet, then got him out of town.
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RE: Fact #1 (Yasuke) – Japanese people started off as black people. That’s a fact backed up with evidence. All of the Asian countries have black ancestry. One of the 3 dynasties of China was founded by black people. Yasuke surely wasn’t the only trained fighter. Martial arts started in Africa.
I don’t doubt that Yasuke traveled to Japan but I have to see authentic proof of documentation from a trusted source to believe the story of his being taken there as a slave. Also, why would a Japanese person be so amazed at a black man when black people are seen in Japanese artifacts. The same is said about Chinese being shocked at black skin when there is a group of black skin indigenous Chinese living in China right now. Black people founded one of the three dynasties of China. Black people are the original man and their presence is documented all over this planet.
RE: Fact #2 (Slaves) – It is also guesstimated that an additional 10 million died during the slave trade. The commercial fishing industry benefitted due to the increase of the fish population caused by slave ships throwing live excess human “cargo’” overboard along with slaves who died during the Atlantic crossing.
Also, slaves who went to the South Atlantic region only had an average life span of 7 years due to the fact that they were worked to death.
Not all black people came to the Americas through the slave trade. Blacks have been indigenous to the Americas thousands of years before Columbus. In fact Africans have long possessed the ship building and navigational knowledge to sail back and forth in trade with the Americas. Note that Columbus’ navigator was a Moor. The Moors ruled Spain for about 800 years and left the beautiful religious
architecture now used by the Catholics and tile work and countless other achievements which are now referred to as Spanish but should be rightly labeled as Moorish including the style referred to as Moroccan. It’s all done in an effort to erase the contributions of black people.