The document describes the history of African slavery in North America from the 15th century until emancipation in the 1860s. Millions of Africans were captured and sold into the transatlantic slave trade, enduring horrific conditions aboard crowded slave ships during the months-long Middle Passage. Enslaved upon arrival, they faced lives of forced labor, family separation, and legal restrictions. The abolition movement gained strength in the 1800s, culminating in Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery in 1865. The legacy and music of slavery, including the blues, persisted long after emancipation.

1. African-American Slavery

2. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• The Universal
Declaration of Human
Rights (1948) is
supposed to be a
common standard of
achievement for all
peoples and all nations.
• There are 30 Human
Rights. In this lesson, we
are going to talk about
Article 4: Freedom from
Slavery

4. Being a slave
• Most of the people who became slaves in North America
were from West Africa.
• You would be living in a village when outsiders attacked and
captured you, and then they would sell you to somebody else,
who sold you to somebody else, and in the end somebody
would sell you to a white man who would keep you in a slave
fort on the coast of Africa.
• Half of the people captured with you died
of hunger or sickness, while you were walking to the coast.

7. • Soon men with guns would force you to get on a
ship, and they would take you to North America.
• The ship was terrible - dirty, and stinky, and you
were crowded like on a crowded bus, and you had
to stay there for two or three months.

8. • From 1526 to 1867, some 12.5 million slaves were
shipped from Africa to the Americas with only
about 10.7 million surviving the journey.

9. • You wore chains that fastened
you to people on either side of
you the whole time.
• You had to lie down because
there wasn't even room to sit
up, the ceiling was so low.
• Almost one out of ten of the
people around you got sick
and died.
• Sometimes people gave up
and tried to starve themselves
to death, but the sailors beat
them or tortured them until
they ate something.

10. • When you got to North America, you got a few weeks
to get healthier, and you got a European-style dress or
pants to wear, and then the slave trader sold you to
whoever would pay the most for you.

11. • The average cost of a slave in America in 1850
was about $400 (about $12,000 in today’s
money)

12. Selling people to be slaves

13. • Most people went to southern states like
Mississippi to pick cotton, though a few people
went further north, to the Carolinas, to plant and
pick tobacco.

15. • Slave owners made their slaves completely dependent
on them, and a system of restrictive codes governed life
among slaves.
• They were prohibited from learning to read and write,
and their behavior and movement was restricted.
• Many masters took sexual liberties with slave women,
and rewarded obedient slave behavior with favors,
while rebellious slaves were brutally punished.

17. • Slave marriages had no legal basis, but slaves
did marry and raise large families

18. • From the 1830s to the 1860s, a
movement to abolish slavery in
America gained strength in the
northern United States, led by
free blacks and white
abolitionists such as Harriet
Beecher Stowe, who published
the bestselling antislavery novel
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1852).

19. • Abraham Lincoln issued a preliminary emancipation
proclamation, and on January 1, 1863, he made it
official that “slaves within any State, or designated
part of a State…in rebellion,…shall be then,
thenceforward, and forever free.”

20. • The 13th Amendment, adopted late in 1865,
officially abolished slavery, but freed blacks’ status
in the post-war South remained precarious, and
significant challenges awaited.

21. THE BLUES STORY
• It began in Africa with one tribe kidnapping people
from neighbouring villages, who were then forced
on to ships and taken off to America. They were
eventually sold into slavery for a few hundred
dollars each and made to work on the plantations
in the south.

22. • With them came their customs, language, dress
and their songs which would be sung in the cotton
fields to help the days go by. From these people
came the children who grew up to become the
great Blues singers and musicians.

23. • Most, like Charlie Patton, Willie Dixon, Magic Sam,
Bo Diddley, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Howlin' Wolf,
Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker & B.B. King came
from Mississippi, while others came from the
surrounding areas, Jimmy Witherspoon from
Arkansas, Blind Willie McTell from Georgia,
Leadbelly & Little Walter from Louisiana, but still
all from the south.