We are pleased to share day III of 540’s 2nd Annual Digital Black History Month Education Campaign
What Was the Second Middle Passage?
The brutally cruel and disruptive phase of the slave trad trade, that abducted and brutally forced about 388,000 Africans directly to the United States is known as “the Middle Passage.
Video | The Middle Passage
But did you know that there is a second Middle Passage. This massacre involved far more black people than were taken from Africa to the United States. It was also uniquely cruel and brutally destructive. And it unfolded during the era when cotton was “king.”
That second forced migration was known as the domestic, or internal, slave trade: “In the seven decades between the ratification of the Constitution [in 1787] and the Civil War [1861],” the historian Walter Johnson tells us in his book Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, “approximately one million enslaved people were relocated from the upper South to the lower South … two thirds of these through … the domestic slave trade.” In other words, two and a half times more African Americans were directly affected by the second Middle Passage than the first one.The enslaved were sometimes marched hundreds of miles to their destinations, on foot and in chains. The years between 1830 and 1860 were the worst in the history of African-American enslavement.
Learn more about the second middle passage here
About the Campaign
Every day throughout the month of February 540Blog will devote space to sharing Little Known Facts About Black Americans Throughout History. For us every month is Black History Month but we recognize and support the continuous need to take time and space to put a special spotlight on the accomplishments of Black and brown Americans from all ethnicities that have literally changed the course of history and yet have legacies that are not know by the masses.
Resources
- Black History Month | History.com
- PBS.org |
540WMain, Inc. 