Featuring Larry Kenneth Alexander
Discover the hidden truth about colonial slavery and its legal abolition before 1776 in our Deep Dive video series.
America’s slavery narrative was built on corruption, not law. Discover how British legal rulings had already abolished colonial slavery before 1776—and how Afrofuturism reclaims history to envision justice and reparations.
America’s Slavery Narrative: An Afrofuturistic Tale Transcript:
Slavery, as an institution, is as old as humanity itself.
Civilizations from Egypt to China, Greece to Rome, and even indigenous African societies practiced slavery in various forms.
Yet the form slavery took in the 13 British American colonies during the mid-17th century was unique.
Here, the condition of being a “slave” in colonial America had only an extralegal underpinning, and yet it became inheritable and permanent due to the corruption of colonial America’s 13 British American governments.
Further, although colonial America’s slave codes and Negro Laws violated English law, they were enforced as being lawful, codified colonial laws by corrupt colonial British government officials within the 13 British American colonies.
Nearing the end of the 17th century, Parliament’s English Bill of Rights (1689) which was ex post facto legislation, retroactively nullified colonial America’s slave codes and Negro Laws.
This act of Parliament incorporated into law the growing conviction that although some Englishmen may inherit privileges, all people enjoy fundamental rights—in particular, “liberty,” which could not be taken away, abrogated, lessened or interfered with even by England’s monarch—who also became subject to English law.
Further, the British imperial government legislatively abolished colonial America’s slave codes and Negro Laws “for all purposes whatsoever” by way of the American Colonies Act (1766) ten years before the Declaration of Independence occurred in July 1776.
Then six years later, England’s highest tribunal, its Court of the King’s Bench declared in the 1772 habeas corpus case of James Somerset versus Charles Stewart that slavery was unconstitutional throughout the kingdom, meaning, slavery was not listed, not expressly provided for, and not authorized by a written enabling act of Parliament.
The Virginians, who to a man owed their financial stability to the odious practice of hereditary slavery became the de facto leaders of America’s rebellion and their pro-slavery views and interests impacted the resulting war with Britain.
However, addressing the “free negro population” and a robust abolitionist movement in northern colonies that were advocating liberation for all colonial American slaves in accordance with the historic Somerset decision were problematic issues for them.
Then, one might ask, how did slavery emerge in the United States?
The coming together of America’s Founding Fathers created an uneasy alliance of divergent ideologues and it was as historian Edmund S. Morgan in his book American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia observed: “The men who came together to found the independent United States, dedicated to freedom and equality, either held slaves or were willing to join hands with those who did… None of them felt entirely comfortable about the fact, but neither did they feel responsible for it. Most of them had inherited both their slaves and their attachment to freedom from an earlier generation, and they knew the two were not unconnected.”
And after the American Revolution ended—America’s first Congress feared disunification over the slavery question and as many of the Founding Fathers claimed ownership of Black colonials, the 500,000 Black Englishmen were denied fundamental due process of law, enslaved and exploited here in the United States.
Had the United States adhered to English law and controlling precedents such as the historic Somerset decision that slavery was not “allowed and approved by the law of the Kingdom” in 1772, as America’s first Congress formally adopted Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence and English law in 1776, which the 13 State Legislatures then adopted—these 500,000 Black Englishmen who became the bedrock of America’s slave-based economy would have been “set at liberty” under the Treaty of Paris of 1783 and Black slavery in America would not have been institutionalized in the U.S. Constitution.
Slavery in the 13 American colonies was the product of a criminal enterprise that compromised the rule of law.
English law made the first 19 Africans that arrived in the colony of Virginia in 1619 indentured servants—not slaves.
This legal status conferred them freedom after their term of indenture.
Under English law, hereditary slavery and the institution of slavery were not recognized on British soil.
Their colonial charters, granted by the Crown, bound each colonial assembly to pass laws with the imperial government’s approval only if they were consistent with English law.
Their children born within the British American colonies had birthright English subjecthood and were legally free people by English law.
Colonial American slavery was uniquely harrowing because it was built on an ideology of racial superiority in violation of the rule of English law.
This colonial British American slave system materialized through the enactment of extralegal slave laws within the 13 British American colonies—laws that cruelly defined Black lives through four principal legal categories: the term of servitude, marriage and family, police and disciplinary powers, and property and civil rights.
Though distinct, these pillars of oppression sprang from a single source: the colony of Virginia’s 1662 hereditary slave law of partus sequitur ventrem, the first colonial American statute codifying the perpetual bondage of Black people.
Colonial elites manipulated and bribed colonial governmental officials to adopt cultural and religious narratives that stripped Black colonials of their fundamental legal rights under the colonial charters and the English Bill of Rights (1689).
Racism was used, which long simmered in the background to justify their enslavement at birth.
Blackness itself was criminalized, and whiteness exalted by the pretended enactment of colonial slave codes and Negro Laws.
Moreover, within two generations, hereditary slavery became a fully entrenched system throughout the 13 British American colonies, engineered to secure economic power for a few while condemning millions to generational, inherited exploitation and suffering.
This was not an accident of history—it was a deliberate construct, a machine of oppression designed to sustain itself indefinitely.
Let’s be clear: Black slavery in the British colonies was neither natural nor inevitable.
It was the product of calculated human choices—rooted in criminality and enabled by the utter collapse of the 13 colonial British governments, as they sanctioned and profited from the brutal dehumanization of an entire race of their own people.
The extralegal colonial law redefined people of African descent as property and placed them below the rule of English law.
This misanthropic system was built brick by brick.
Colonial slavery was not founded on legitimate laws but on sheer lawlessness—fueled by the unchecked corruption of the 13 British American governments that institutionalized racial subjugation.
But what if America had taken a different course?
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