The ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865 marked the end of “slavery” in the U.S., but the system simply evolved instead of dying. The addition of the 13th Amendment shouldn’t blind us from the truth. The United States wants us to believe slavery simply “ended,” but our ancestors were slaughtered without hesitation. Not in small numbers; in millions. More than 15 million men, women, and children were victims of the transatlantic slave trade. An estimated 14-15% died during the Middle Passage alone, amounting to roughly 2.25 million lives lost at sea. That number doesn’t even account for those who were beaten, worked to death, or murdered after arrival.
This wasn’t just slavery. It was a genocide, a deliberate destruction. No Amendment can erase that reality.
It wasn’t “slavery” when brutality went beyond labor and into total dehumanization.
White slave-owners participated in acts of extreme cruelty that stripped Africans of all Humanity. These slave-owners would kill the captured Africans while they were being transported on ships and cooked them to feed themselves as well as other slaves on board. Slaves and those taken in Slave raids were also killed and eaten.
“The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture” by Vincent Woodard is a book that helps explain how violence, dominance, and power during U.S. slavery crossed into disturbing symbolic territory.
It wasn’t “slavery” when African children were used as alligator bait. When their lives were treated as entertainment instead of human lives
White American dehumanized Black people so completely that even children were portrayed and reportedly used as alligator bait. This wasn’t a myth, instead it was a repeated trope in folklore and popular culture. A society that could imagine Black children and infants as disposable was never just “slavery”, it was cruelty without limitations.
It wasn’t “slavery” when our bodies were treated as raw materials. When our skin was taken and used as leather.
There is documented evidence that African bodies were treated as materials, not human beings. Even though it wasn’t widespread nor long-lasting, reports describe incidences where Black flesh was used to make shoes.
Dr. David Pilgrim
Curator
Jim Crow Museum
LEATHER FROM HUMAN SKIN [Philadelphia News.] Printed in The Mercury, Saturday March 17, 1888
I remember that two or three years ago I incidentally referred to a prominent physician of this city wearing shoes made from the skin of negroes. He still adhered to that custom, insisting that the tanned hide of an African makes the most enduring and the most pliable leather known to man.
Only last week I met him upon the street with a brand new pair of shoes. I looked at his foot wear, as I always do – his pedal coverings have an irresistible fascination for me – and said, with a smile:
“Is the down trodden African still beneath your feet?” In the most matter of fact way, and without the shadow of a smile, he answered: ” I suppose you mean to inquire if I still wear shoes made of the skin of a negro. I certainly do, and I don’t propose changing in that respect until I find a leather that is softer and will last longer and present a better appearance. I have no sentiment about this matter. Were I a Southerner – in the American sense of the word – I might be accused of being actuated by a race prejudice. But I am a foreigner by birth, although now an American citizen by naturalization. I fought in the rebellion that the blacks might be freed. I would use a white man’s skin for the same purpose if it were sufficiently thick, and if any’ one has a desire to wear my epidermis upon his feet after I have drawn my last breath he has my ante mortem permission.”
The doctor’s shoes always exhibit a peculiarly rich lustrousness in their blackness. He assures me that they never hurt his feet. The new pair he was using when I last saw him emitted no creaking sound and appeared as comfortable as though they had been worn a month. Their predecessors, he told me, had been in constant use for eight months. He obtains the skins from the bodies of negroes which have been dissected in one of our big medical colleges. The best leather is obtained from the thighs. The soles are formed by placing several layers of leather together. The skin is prepared by a tanner at Womseldorf, 16 miles from Reading. The shoes are fashioned by a French shoemaker of this city, who knows nothing of the true character of the leather, but who often wonders at its exquisite smoothness, and says that it excels the finest French calf-skin.
Do not for a moment think that this doctor presents an exceptional case of one who puts the human skin to a practical use. Medical students frequently display a great variety of articles in which in the skin or bones of some dissected mortal has been gruesomely utilized, and in bursts of generosity they sometimes present these to their friends, who prize them highly. One of the dudest dudes in town carries a match-safe covered with a portion of the skin of a beautiful young woman who was found drowned in the Delaware river. It still retains its natural colour. Another young man with whom I am acquainted carries a cigar case made of negro skin, a ghastly skull and crossbones appearing on one side in relief. One of the best known surgeons in this country, who resides in this city, has a beautiful instrument case, entirely covered with leather made from an African’s skin. A young society lady of this city wears a beautiful pair of dark slippers, the remarkable lustrousuess of whose leather invariably excites the admiration of her friends when they see them. The young doctor who presented them to her recently returned from an extended foreign tour, and he told her that he had purchased them from a Turk in Alexandria, and that he did not know what sort of leather they were made of, but he supposed it was the skin of some wild animal. As a matter of fact, the skin came from a negro cadaver, which was once prone on a Jefferson College dissecting table, and the leather was prepared in Womseldorf. The rosettes on the slippers were deftly fashioned from the negro’s kinky hair.
The Mercury, Saturday March 17 1888
It wasn’t slavery when our women were repeatedly raped and dehumanized.
Slave-owners systematically sexually abused enslaved men and women just to satisfy their own power and desire. This constant sexual abuse of enslaved people shattered marriages, families and relationships that many African slaves struggled to preserve. The multiple historical records that speak of mixed-race children during doesn’t reflect intimacy or choice but exposes how widespread and normalized sexual violence was under slavery.
Slavery existed worldwide, and yet we constantly forget it. Our ancestors were enslaved on every continent. African leaders were not just bystanders; they were complicit. Many sold their own people into slavery, profiting from the same system that would dehumanise them. This doesn’t excuse what was done by Europeans and Americans, but it shows the cruelty and betrayal ran deep, even within communities themselves. But slavery in the United States was different. It was race-based, hereditary, and rooted in pure hatred. It was defined by extreme, systemic brutality and the total dehumanisation of Black people. A rigid system that was designed to enforce white supremacy through relentless physical violence, sexual abuse, and permanent tearing apart families.
Website Credit:
Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Delectable_Negro
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alligator_bait
National African – American Reparations Commission-
21 truths and myths about the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Jim Crow Museum –
https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/question/2013/april.htm
Trove –
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/9144128
