I almost spit out my coffee while reading Lloyd Jolley’s “Tell the whole story” letter (Our Readers’ Views, Sept. 13), which lamely tries to state that black plantation owners are just as culpable for slavery as their white counterparts.
He states that 12,760 slaves were owned by black plantation owners. From my research, that appears to be true, but what he fails to mention is that number is out of 2,009,043 slaves, for a total of 0.6 percent. And, according to historian Carter G. Woodson, research from the 1830s census records show that the “majority of the black owners of slaves were such from the point of view of philanthropy. In many instances, the husband purchased the wife or vice versa. Slaves of black people were in some cases the children of a free father who had purchased his wife. If he did not thereafter emancipate the mother, as so many such husbands failed to do, his own children were born his slaves and were thus reported to the numerators.”
Lloyd wonders why we focus only on the white slave owners: Well, it’s because they were 99.4 percent of the problem.
