Larry Koger, author of “Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860” will be our speaker for the May Chapter meeting. We can expect his presentation “Black Masters: The Misunderstood Slaveowners” to be quite informative. Please CONTACT US if would like to participate in this Zoom meeting but are not yet a Chapter member.

Afro-American slaveowners are misunderstood masters by the lay audience and even among many scholars. Yet they existed in small to modest numbers throughout the south and parts of the north. Many of these individuals purchased family members with the hope of protecting them from the stigma of chattel slavery and attempted to emancipate them. In South Carolina, many black masters were slaveowners for profit. They exploited the labor of their human chattel to work on their plantations, farms, and commercial businesses just like their white counterparts. Some of these individuals knew the yoke of bondage as they were enslaved but chose to enslave their own race. A few actually immigrated from West Africa as free people of color and transported African slaves into South Carolina to work their newly acquired plantations. The history of slavery in antebellum South Carolina is neither black nor white. It is written in many shades of grey where Afro-Americans played a small, yet significant role in the peculiar institution.