The U.S. government had a slave census,
and it showed that for the U.S. population as a whole, 1.4% of households owned one or more slaves and a very small subset of those had more than 5 slaves.
Now obviously in Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, and the Southwest Territory; the percentage of slave holding households was far greater.
Read it for yourself at census.gov:
http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/00165897ch14.pdf
And a material number of slaveholders were black or had some black ancestry. Most of these actually lived in the lower South. Here's an example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Johnson_(colonist)
Furthermore, there were white slaves being imported into the U.S. in addition to African slaves and they were owned by both whites and blacks... a fact which was airbrushed out of the textbooks used in the k-12th U.S. public education system after the late 1960s for reasons of political correctness.
Read '
Black Property Owners in the south 1790-1915' by
Dr. Loren Schweninger (Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina).
And certainly the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution put a formal end to the institution of slavery in 1865. 150 years have passed since but it's important to note that the importation of slaves came to an end in 1808 (as provided by the Constitution), a mere 32 years after independence with slavery being outlawed in most states decades before the Civil War.
Only a tiny percentage of today’s white citizens, perhaps as few as 5%, bear any authentic sort of indirect "generational guilt" for the exploitation of African slave labor.
Of course, reconstruction in the post-Civil War period (following emancipation) was a failure for blacks who had to endure a hundred years of Jim Crow laws, economic oppression, indefensible discrimination, etc... and certainly this systemic oppression prevented most blacks (not all) from realizing the "American dream" of economic prosperity in the U.S. during this time. Acknowledged.
However, Viligant_Warrior is correct that the present circumstance of American blacks, in general, are not rooted in the abolished antique institution of slavery or even the historical failure of reconstruction following abolition b
ut rather primarily the choices blacks in America have and continue to make since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in an environmental context of the amoral sprawling liberal welfare state.
The correlation between the decline of the black family and illegitimacy (which now hovers at about 70 percent) with the "War on Poverty" approaches 1:1. It's a direct correlation.
And as
Dr. Patrick Fagan states, "Illegitimacy is an important issue because it has a great influence on all statistical indicators of a population group’s progress or decline." See
here.
I'm not arguing for a 1:1 causal relationship between modern liberal/progressive policy and the decline of the black family as you do Viligant_Warrior but I certainly do acknowledge that the correlation is real and that there is a causal relationship between them. In my view,
Moynihan's emphasis on the need for economic development in black communities with particular focus on black men in which he argued for
limited welfare assistance and job creation which did not disrupt black family structures was spot on and ahead of its time (despite both black power advocates and modern liberals rejecting it almost out of hand at the time).
But like Jahsoul, I also assert other factors besides. But mine and his are primarily different for I assert that the greatest among them is the choices blacks have made and continue to make in the modern environment they've been presented with.
I don't "whitewash" their choices and blame them on welfare, society, "whitey," the government, etc...
Black people are free to form strong nuclear families, strong moral communities, and use their economic and political power wisely to benefit black people in general. They've had that ability now for decades but most have chosen to do the opposite. And for these "religion" hasn't helped. I'm always amazed at the stark dichotomy between the belief in God so many black males profess and the criminal lifestyle they choose to live out. The immoral culture blacks have constructed since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as their identity, and which is splashed all over the mainstream media and Internet, mirrors the empirical data.
None of us owned slaves. None of us treated them as subhumans. None of us participated in a lynching. None of us drowned civil rights workers in Mississippi.
