You realize the slaves from Africa were slaves “in” Africa… at the time slaves were brought to America is was a world wide institution. Most of the slaves brought to America came from areas of Africa where one third to one half of the population were slaves, not of whites but of the other tribes. Estimates are that at the time there were 159 million slaves in west and central Africa between 1500 and 1800.
When you say the Africans were not enslaved for committing “a crime”, you are making assumptions. You have no idea why any individual slave was enslaved, if you do you might publish on the subject because there is a dearth of data on the subject. Some most likely were enslaved for committing a crimes, but were most likely enslaved by their fellow Africans for losing in war. Sometimes for “profit” other times simply as prisoners of war.
Nor was their life in Africa any better.
The practice of slavery goes back to before ancient Egypt. The real unique thing that happened during the time of colonial America was even as slavery was common throughout the world, the evolving belief in human rights largely in Europe arising out of the Reformation and the idea that God had a personal relationship with man lead to a movement to end slavery. I urge you to invest some time in how the concepts of classical liberalism which led to the end of slavery evolved from the secularization of the reformation.
More importantly, thanks to the superior military capabilities of the European nations, they were able to force most of the world to abandon slavery just as the North did with the South by the end of the Civil War, though slavery does continue in parts of Africa today, it is relatively isolated. Slavery was a horrible institution and you should be proud to be a citizen of one of the countries of the world that did more to eliminate slavery than most others. We are not a perfect country, but on the issue of slavery, we have a better history than most countries if you bother to study the issue with an open mind.
So yes, we had slavery and institution that existed everywhere in the world at the time. The slaves in our country did not have a particularly unique pathway to slavery, it was the same as that in the world.
You might benefit from Thomas Sowell’s video on the subject below… as an African America with advanced degrees from Harvard, the University of Chicago, and Columbia in economics and a lifetime of studying the social history of race relations, you might learn something listening to him, that you have not been exposed to elsewhere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWrfjUzYvPo
Just as importantly, it would behoove our nation to realize that hundreds of thousands of American citizens gave their lives to end slavery. If we spent more time on their sacrifice, we might better appreciate that we are all in this together trying to forge the nation that MLK spoke of in his “Dream” speech.
