Why Caribbean Plantations Became Death Camps'' #blackhistory #america #shorts #blackamerica

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]9 years that it took to write the book.

[00:00:01]6 years of that was research. The other part of it had to do with doing interviews of elders and reading slave narratives. And there are thousands of them. This is just one taken from the Library of Congress. Sarah Gudger from North Carolina wrote, "Never know nothing but work. Never knew rest. Felt like my back was going to break. Just the gospel truth."

[00:00:20]Then I looked at what happened in the sugar plantations.

[00:00:26]And this was amazing. One final set of grim numbers underlines the way slaves on sugar plantations like Codrington, uh was a plantation in Barbados, were systematically worked to an early death.

[00:00:36]When slavery ended in the United States, slaves imported over the centuries had grown to a population nearly 4 million.

[00:00:41]When it ended in the British West Indies, total slave imports of well over 2 million left a surviving slave population of only about 670,000.

[00:00:49]More than twice as many slaves were shipped to the island of Jamaica alone than all 13 North American colonies combined. The Caribbean was a In fact, the reason why there was more importation of slaves [music] to these plantations is because they died so frequently.

[00:01:06]They were treated so [music] badly, ate so poorly that females never reached their menstrual cycles.

[00:01:12]They never [music] actually started their menstrual cycles, so they couldn't reproduce, you see.

[00:01:17]And so many of them died, they had to import more.

[00:01:20]That's how treacherous it was, you black folks that you are. Isn't that ironic, though?

[00:01:25]What's so ironic is black people run from the shame of feeling like they're perceived I I mean, I live with that so much that when I would go to hotels, I would leave it cleaner.

[00:01:37]Cuz your mother, everybody's mother taught you leave it cleaner than you found it. So, black folks are so hyper-sensitive, I was cleaning up the hotel room. Cuz I wouldn't want anyone to think I'm dirty.

[00:01:49]Right? Now, all the people in the audience that are of color, how much harder did your parents tell you you had to work to get to even? How much harder?

[00:01:58]YOU HAD TO WORK TWICE AS HARD. NOW, HOW COME I KNEW that about you?

[00:02:04]How come I knew that? Think about it.

[00:02:05]You see?

[00:02:07]But we're so hyper-sensitive cuz of the shame, right? And then our ancestors WOULD WORK TO DEATH.

[00:02:13]To death. Recently, they unearthed a slave cemetery.

[00:02:17]They unearthed actually a slave cemetery in New York City. It's on Wall Street, by the way, in the shadow of the bull.

[00:02:25]Unearthed a slave cemetery, and they still to this day they're struggling.

[00:02:28]They recently, you know, have done a lot in terms of commemoration. I went to the Took me everything to get to it. They had it blocked off so you couldn't get to it. But they cuz they didn't want to deal with it. You know, you can't just bulldoze a cemetery. So, here in all these skyscrapers