Travelers learning about the underground railroad should start here in Cincinnati before making their way up to the Susan B. Antony House in Rochester, the Windsor-Detroit river crossing, and the Chatham-Kent Black Historical Society. The slave trade existed In Africa but was made more brutal under the Europeans, who brought 11 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic by 1886.
I don’t need the recount the 500 years of history of slavery in the Americas here. The tour begins at the third floor with 15th-century origins of the slave trade and visitors work their way down to modern day slavery around the world. Throughout the tour, visitors will see damning evidence of the cruelty and extent of US slavery. Although northern states only had single-digit percentages of slaves in their population, places like South Carolina had as many as 61% slaves in their population by just 1770.
Even in the last century, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation has not eliminated slavery. Criminalizing drugs that Black Americans take more often than white people and then incarceration them can be seen as a modern form of American state-sponsored slavery. Around the world, people are tricked and kidnapped into forced labor and made to purchase their own freedom from chattel slavery.
