IN THE BEGINNING...

     The genesis of the Black community started aboard the slave ships transporting enslaved Africans from their homeland to America. In Africa, they had lived a varied life. Women, as well as, men were skilled farmers and traders.

They played interesting kinds of music. Their story-tellers passed along famous tales and poems in the oral tradition. African artists made beautiful masks, statues, and gold jewelry.

In the early 1400s, Europeans began traveling beyond their own lands looking for new wealth. The Portuguese began trading for gold in West Africa. But then, they discovered something worth more than gold. They began trading the Africans as slaves to plantation owners in the New World.

Soon the slave trade became a big business. Local African tribal chiefs captured their own people from neighboring tribes and traded with the Europeans from England, Holland, Spain, and Portugal for knives, cloth, guns, and other cheap goods.

The captured Africans were chained together and packed on narrow wooded shelves on board the ship. The filth and stench was terrible, and thousands of Africans died from diseases. The trip across the Atlantic took two months or more.


From about 1492 to 1776, more than 6.5 million people traveled across the Atlantic to the so-called New World. Millions more died during this terrible journey across the ocean, which is now called The Middle Passage.


Yet it was here that the Black community began, because despite their African tribal differences, including language and cultural traditions, they all had one thing in common:

They were being taken away from their homeland against their will. So they came together based on this commonality and decided how they would deal with it.

 Most often they rebelled by jumping into the ocean to their deaths, choosing to die rather than be enslaved. Those who did not, bonded together and helped each other to survive the arduous trip across the Atlantic. They shared food, water  and prayers to their gods, and  by whatever means they could, they made it to the other side.