Module 3: Drawing the Color Line

In Chapter 2: Drawing the Color Line, Howard Zinn discusses how slavery was developed in the English colonies. He begins by describing that the Virginians of 1619 needed labor, to grow corn and tobacco. Since the English were outnumbered by the Indians, they had to resort to black slaves for labor. Apparently black enslavement was easy because Zinn explains that, “The blacks had been torn from their land culture, forced into a situation where the heritage of language, dress, custom, and family relations was bit by bit obliterated.” American slavery became “the most cruel form of slavery in history.” (Zinn 25)

According to Zinn, slavery in America became terribly cruel and absurd due to limitless profit that came from capitalistic agriculture; “the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of racial hatred, with that relentless clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave.” Helpless black Africans were often captured, sold on the coast and packed onto slave ships. Many of them died of suffocation, suicide, etc during their transport overseas. Although one of every three blacks may have died during the terrible trip overseas, Zinn points out that it was still very profitable.

Despite the terrible trip overseas, the blacks were subject to a system that was “psychological and physical at the same time.” (Zinn 29) Zinn further explains the psychological and physical system that the blacks had to endure as slaves in America; he mentions that the blacks slaves were “taught discipline, to see blackness as a sign of subordination, to be awed by the power of the master, to merge their interest with the master’s, destroying their own individual needs.” (Zinn 29) Just as damaging as the psychological effects, the black slaves were physically forced to hard labor; breakup of the family; and constant whipping, burning, mutilation and death.

This is an example of what the slaves had to endure from their masters.

The inhumane practices toward the black slaves resulted in rebellions and escapes. A Virginia slave code in the 1700s warns slaves that if caught for escaping, the masters may at “their discretion shall think fit, for the reclaiming any such incorrigible slave, and terrifying others from the like practices…” (Zinn 29) At one point, during the early years of slavery, treatment of white indentured servants and black slaves were about the same. However, the American colonies prevented indentured white servants and black slaves from cooperating by passing special slave codes; The Virginia Assembly, “proclaimed that all white men were superior to black” and “went on to offer their social (but white) inferiors a number of benefits previously denied.” (Zinn 30) It was perhaps this turning point that divided and drew the “color line” because during 1660s, indentured white servants and black slaves formed conspiracies or planned escapes together, but the white elite always seemed to be one step ahead of the game. Hence, one can agree with Zinn that American slavery was the most cruel form of slavery in history.

1. Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, Volume I: American Beginnings to Reconstruction, The New Press, New York, 2003

2. http://answersinhistory.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/slave.jpg