In the early 1500s, the transatlantic slave trade commenced. Europeans invaded west and central Africa, capturing free people, enslaving them, and placing them on ships as cargo. Conditions aboard these slave ships were horrendous, and the voyage was long and brutal.
As centuries passed, slave scientists developed ways to maximize the amount of people they could steal, all the while distributing people throughout the west. In all, 12.5 million people were said to have been taken from Africa between the years of 1525-1866. Even though the United States Congress passed a law forbidding the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, the practice would still go on for decades.
In this episode of Black History In Two Minutes or So hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr., with additional commentary from Hasan Jeffries of Ohio State University, we take a deeper look at the inhumane journey African people were forced into all in the name of European greed.
