Slavery did not start in 1619. It began with kings. Whenever you had the first king on top you had slaves on the bottom. All ancient cultures made slaves of those captured in battle, as seen in Babylon, Persia, Greece, China, India, and Africa.

The first African slaves brought to the English colony of Virginia came on a Dutch ship in 1619. Over the next two centuries, the number of slaves tragically grew from "20 and odd" to an estimated 4 million by 1860. Originally, African slaves brought to Virginia served seven years and then were freed.

Anthony Johnson was a black indentured slave from Angola who arrived in Virginia in 1621. He completed his indentured service and gained his freedom. He then became one of the first Africans to own property in America.

Acquiring a 250-acre tobacco plantation, Johnson owned four white slaves and one black slave, John Casor. After seven years, Casor left and began working as a free man on another farm. In 1655, Johnson brought a lawsuit and won to keep Casor a slave indefinitely. This legal action made John Casor one of the first persons of African descent in the 13 English Colonies to be a slave for life.

In the 1600s, King James I, and later Charles I and Oliver Cromwell, sold over 500,000 Irish Catholics into slavery onto plantations in the West Indies, Antigua, Montserrat, Jamaica, Barbados, as well as Virginia and New England.

Historian Thomas Sowell wrote in the article "Irresponsible Education": "More whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United States. White slaves were still being bought and sold in the Ottoman Empire decades after blacks were freed in the United States."

The notorious triangle slave trade began when slaves captured by warring African tribes were sold to Europeans and transported to sugar plantations in the Caribbean where rum was made and shipped to England.

Haiti had several slave revolts against the French government. Fear that Haitian slave revolts would spread was a compelling factor in convincing Napoleon to sell the French Louisiana Territory to the United States during Thomas Jefferson's Presidency.

Some Native Americans owned African slaves. In 1842, there was an African slave revolt in Cherokee Territory. After colonial conflicts with American Indians, some were sold into slavery in the West Indies.

In the 1700s, many colonies tried to end slavery, but Queen Anne of England would not allow it, as she was part owner of the Royal African Company, which was supplying 4,800 slaves per year to the Spanish colonies.

In 1770, Anthony Benezet, a Protestant Christian, joined the Quakers in Philadelphia and began a school in his home to teach slave children to read. He helped found the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. It was the first society in America dedicated to abolishing slavery. Bassett, a Signer of the United States Constitution, converted to Methodism, freed all his slaves, and paid them as hired labor.

In 1787, the Northwest Ordinance outlawed slavery in the territory which would become Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

George Washington's original 73-page draft of his Inaugural Address, 1789, included: "I rejoice in a belief that ... mankind will reverse the absurd position that the many were made for the few; and that they will not continue slaves in one part of the globe, when they can become freemen in another."

On February 3, 1790, less than three months before he died, Benjamin Franklin petitioned Congress to ban slavery. In December 1806, Thomas Jefferson pushed through legislation in Congress ending the importation of slaves into the United States.

In 1839, a Portuguese ship from Sierra Leone transferred 53 slaves to the Cuban ship Amistad. On July 1, 1839, the African slaves broke free of their shackles and seized control of the ship, demanding to be sailed back to Africa. The captain misdirected the ship, sailing slowly east during the day, but quickly west at night, finally landing at Long Island, New York, where the slaves were arrested.

In 1841, the Amistad case went to the Supreme Court and former President John Quincy Adams argued the case and, against all odds, won freedom for these Africans. Adams died on February 23, 1848. A pallbearer at his funeral was a freshman Congressman from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln.

On April 12, 1861, Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina's Charleston Harbor. Less than 34 hours later, Union forces surrendered. Traditionally, this event has been used to mark the beginning of the Civil War. Around 360,222 Union soldiers died during the Civil War, fighting to end slavery.

In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Slavery was ended in the United States after the Civil War and the passage of the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

There are more slaves today than at any time in human history. An estimated 27 million people in the world are forced to work, held through fraud, under threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence, in forced marriages, in sex-trafficking and prostitution. Those most loudly demanding reparations for past slavery are strangely silent regarding present-day slavery. Though officially illegal, slavery, by its different names, continues today in:

The 1800s Civil Rights Movement occurred during the Reconstruction era. Despite the resistance of the Confederate South formed by Democrats to preserve slavery, the Republican Party, which was formed in 1854 by abolitionists for the express purpose of ending slavery, pushed aggressively for Reconstruction measures to secure the rights of newly freed African Americans post-Civil War.

The first African Americans in Congress were all Republicans. Notably, the first two African American members of Congress (Representative Joseph Rainey of South Carolina and Senator Hiram Revels of Mississippi) were elected to office in 1870. They, along with the African American members of Congress who joined them a few years later, worked hard to pass laws making all men, regardless of their race, equal.

Republicans supported the Freedmen's Bureau and enacted two Civil Rights Acts (1866 and 1875), which sought to protect the rights of African Americans and provide educational and economic opportunities.

Republicans enacted also a trio of constitutional amendments: the 13th Amendment ratified on December 6, 1865 (that abolished slavery), the 14th Amendment ratified on July 9, 1868 (that made formerly enslaved people citizens), and the 15th Amendment ratified on February 3, 1870 (that gave all men the right to vote regardless of race).

Despite these legal advancements and an era of African American achievements, this period saw the rise of discriminatory local and state laws enacted by Democrats, including Black Codes and Jim Crow laws, and the use of violence by groups like the Ku Klux Klan, to maintain white supremacy and undermine African American rights.

In A Short History of Reconstruction (Eric Foner, 1990, page 184), here is how the close relationship between the Ku Klux Klan and the Democrat Party is described:

“In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired the restoration of white supremacy. It aimed to destroy the Republican party’s infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life.”

Democrats try to shift blame for their culpability to the Republican Party by falsely claiming that after the 1960s the two political parties switched sides on protecting civil rights for African Americans. Are we to believe this? It did not happen since Republicans, for over 150 years, did not embrace slavery, enacted no discriminatory laws, nor supported the horrors inflicted on African Americans by the Klan that killed over 3,000 Republicans, 2,000 of whom were black and 1,000 white.

The Modern Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s focused on dismantling segregation and ensuring equal rights through nonviolent protests, legal challenges, and legislative action. Key events included the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which declared school segregation unconstitutional.

Enacted also were the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960 and 1964, as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These laws were championed by Republican Senator Everett Dirksen who played pivotal roles in the legislative process, where his bipartisan approach and legislative acumen helped overcome filibusters by powerful Southern Democrats and secure the necessary votes.

The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, enacted on July 2, 1964, bans segregation in public accommodations on the grounds of race, religion, or national origin. Title VII prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin.