By Larry Kenneth Alexander
Blacks born in colonial America were Englishmen with an inalienable right to liberty under Britain’s rule of law and those who purported to be slavemasters were criminals. The product of graft -slavery was America’s first continuing criminal enterprise. However, with Lord Chief Justice Mansfield’s utterance in 1772, “… Let justice be done although the heavens fall…” – a freedom trial of a slave named James Somerset and then Britain highest court’s declaration that slavery was unconstitutional, America’s thirteen colonies exploded into rebellion. Myths developed to shield the founding generation and were used to further nationalist chauvinism.