7 biggest lies about blacks & love & sex

Ebony, June, 2003 by Lerone Bennett, Jr.

A point of overriding importance here is that neither William nor his parents were slaves. Such evidence as survives indicates that they were--like most of the White immigrants--indentured servants who were freed after working for a specified number of years.

The first Black family of Virginia was by no means unique. There were similar developments in other colonies where Black men and women married in the church, used the courts and accumulated property. So--to cite another spectacular example--Anthony van Angola and Lucie d'Angola were married with the appropriate pomp and circumstance in the Dutch church in New York, then New Amsterdam, in 1641.

Not all Africans welcomed the newfangled rites. Large numbers, particularly in the South, wooed and wed in feasts and weddings that synthesized African and European forms. An early example of an improvised African-American wedding in North Carolina was reported by Thomas Brickell.

"Their Marriages," he wrote, "are generally performed among themselves, there being very little ceremony used upon that Head; for the Man makes the Woman a Present, such as a Brass Ring or some other Toy, which she accepts of, becomes his wife ..."

With the development of large-scale slavery, these early developments were pushed into the background and a systematic attempt was made to distort the human impulses of all Blacks, free and slave. Under this system--a system supported by the U.S. government and the churches and the universities--Black love was denied legal sanction and support and the Black family was systematically violated. For more than 200 years, slaves were violently denied the right to marry legally, and slavemasters violently and repeatedly separated husbands from wives and children from parents.

Violence: Black love in America was shaped and distorted by White violence and by a breathtakingly creative response to that violence. For in the dirt and deprivation and degradation of one of the vilest systems created by man, the slave and his lady transcended their environment by the toughness of their spirit, dancing and loving and laughing and hoping on the edge of nothingness. And no one can read the record, fragmentary as it is, without a sense of awe at the audacity of their hope.

That hope manifested itself in concentric circles and enveloped larger and larger groups in extended family relationships that seemed to include most members of Slave Row. And within the circles of these circles, the slaves created unique mating and marriage patterns of the slavemasters.

It was customary in this period for slaves to marry in Slave Row ceremonies organized around the proverbial broomstick. We don't know, we may never know, the symbolic importance of this ritual, but former slaves said couples usually celebrated their marriage by jumping over a broomstick. Georgianna Gibbs, who was a slave in Virginia, said the slaves jumped "a broom three times," but the procedure in Kentucky, another slave said, was for the man to jump the broom while the woman stood still. Whatever the case, it was necessary, according to almost all observers, to jump high, for, according to Jeff Calhoun, who was a slave in Alabama, to "stump your toe on the broom meant you got trouble comin' 'tween you."