Old images of African Americans picking cotton remind many of the oppression suffered by generations of Black slaves before the Emancipation Proclamation. For Black Americans in particular ...

And for people of African descent, the cotton gin was not ... made huge profits by selling their slaves. This domestic slave trade devastated black families. American-born slaves were torn from ...

They brought with them slaves to do the backbreaking ... control the weighing and marketing of cotton, and control the recordkeeping. "We'd get $12 per bale and we had to pick hard in order ...