re: Think you're having a bad day at work?

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You do realize that "freed blacks" owned their own family members and purchased other blacks to keep families together and protect them, right?

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That is only partly correct. Yes, some did do that.

However, there were instances, in which free blacks had a real economic interest in the institution of slavery and held slaves in order to improve their economic status.
Simply look at Nat Butler from Baltimore (I believe?).

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an essay in the North American Review by Calvin Wilson in 1905, presents some hair-raising challenges to the idea that black people who owned their own family members always treated them well: A free black in Trimble County, Kentucky, " … sold his own son and daughter South, one for $1,000, the other for $1,200." … A Maryland father sold his slave children in order to purchase his wife. A Columbus, Georgia, black woman — Dilsey Pope — owned her husband. "He offended her in some way and she sold him … " Fanny Canady of Louisville, Kentucky, owned her husband Jim — a drunken cobbler — whom she threatened to "sell down the river." At New Bern, North Carolina, a free black wife and son purchased their slave husband-father. When the newly bought father criticized his son, the son sold him to a slave trader. The son boasted afterward that "the old man had gone to the corn fields about New Orleans where they might learn him some manners."

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