Black History Month

Auction Signs Of Africans (Negroes) Signs were posted throughout the colonies for human cargo available to be sold as slaves. Born in violence, slavery survived by the lash. Beginning with the initial slave trade that tore Africans away from everything they knew and sent them in chain to a distant land to toil for strangers, every stage of master-slave relations depended either directly or indirectly physical coercion. The routine functioning of Southern farms and plantations rested on the authority of the owners and their representatives, supported by the state, to inflict pain on their human property. Plenty of pain was inflicted. Slave owners directed especially repressive measures against Africans, for newly imported slaves offered pervasive resistance to the conditions under which they found themselves. They ignored the Anglicized names their owners awarded them. One of the slave’s greatest fears was to be sold off and separated from loved ones. According to Mortimer Thomson, a newspaper correspondent who covered the Butler sale, “The expression on the faces of all who stepped on the block was always the same, and told of more anguished than it is in the power of words to express.”