re: Is this likely true? A Truth Bomb?

quote:

---

Don’t forget the first slave owners in the US were black.

---

quote:

---

Yes, the first legally recognized slave owner in the English colonies that became the United States was a Black man.

Key historical facts

1619: The first recorded Africans (about 20) arrived in Virginia aboard the White Lion. They were initially treated as indentured servants, similar to many Europeans at the time—bound for a term of years, not lifelong hereditary chattel slavery. Indentured servitude was common for both Blacks and Whites in the early colonial period.

Anthony Johnson (born around 1600 in Angola, arrived as an indentured servant ~1621): He gained his freedom, acquired land, and became a prosperous farmer in Virginia and Maryland. By the 1650s, he owned slaves. In the landmark 1655 case Johnson v. Casor, the Virginia court ruled that Johnson could hold John Casor (a Black man) as a slave for life, even after Casor claimed his indenture term had ended. This is the first known judicial sanction of lifelong, hereditary slavery in the English colonies. Johnson also owned White indentured servants.

Johnson was not unique—other free Blacks in the early colonies owned slaves. This reflected the fluid early colonial system before racial chattel slavery hardened into law by the late 1600s/early 1700s (via slave codes in Virginia, South Carolina, etc.).

Broader context

Pre-1619: Slavery was widespread globally, including in Africa (where kingdoms and tribes practiced it and sold war captives), the Islamic world, and among Native American tribes. Europeans bought Africans from African traders at ports like those in modern Ghana, Angola, and Senegal. The transatlantic trade was driven by demand for labor in the Americas.
European indenture and early slavery: Thousands of White Europeans arrived as indentured servants (many involuntary: convicts, debtors, kidnapped).

Chattel slavery of Africans became dominant in the South due to economics (cash crops like tobacco, rice, cotton), disease resistance, and legal changes that made Black status hereditary and tied to race.
Scale: By 1860, ~393,000 Africans had been imported to what is now the U.S. (a small fraction of the ~12 million total transatlantic trade). Most slaves were owned by a minority of Whites, concentrated in the South. Free Blacks (including some mixed-race) owned slaves in places like Louisiana, South Carolina, and Virginia—sometimes family members, sometimes for profit. The 1830 census recorded thousands of Black slave owners.

First European slave traders/owners: Portuguese and Spanish began large-scale African imports to the Americas in the 1500s (e.g., in Florida, the Caribbean, South America). In English North America, it evolved gradually.

Nuance, not myth

Claims that "Blacks were the first slave owners" are sometimes overstated in memes to downplay later White-majority involvement or the racialized system that developed.

The accurate version: In British North America, free Blacks were among the earliest documented owners of lifelong slaves, and slavery was not invented by English colonists—it was an extension of existing practices. The mature U.S. institution of race-based chattel slavery (with anti-miscegenation laws, bans on Black testimony, etc.) became overwhelmingly associated with White owners by the 1700s–1800s. Both free Blacks and Native Americans owned slaves; abolitionists included Blacks (e.g., Frederick Douglass) and Whites.

Primary sources: Virginia court records, colonial censuses, works by historians like Winthrop Jordan (White Over Black), Edmund Morgan, and Philip Morgan. The narrative has been politicized on all sides, but court documents from the 1650s confirm Johnson's case.

---