My family's slave-owning legacy is America's history, and challenge
My great-great-grandfather A.J. Pickett owned two cotton plantations in Alabama. He was a historian and an apologist for slavery. He wrote that the South’s steamy climate was so destructive of the constitutions of whites that the land could never be successfully cultivated without African labor. He despised abolitionists and, in one pamphlet, defended the South’s system of what he called “mild domestic slavery.” As my great-great-grandfather’s words illustrate, America was built on the backs of enslaved Africans. The debt keeps compounding and can never be repaid. For tho...
Source: azcentral.com