Is it a fact that African-Americans owned slaves in the South before the Civil War, but few people seem to know it?
If what Calvin Dill Wilson states in his short 19-page book "Black Masters," is true, wealthy free African-Americans bought and sold members of their own race just as did the Southern white planter, and African-Americans, once slaves and freed by their white masters, became slave-owners, themselves.
"To judge from all that is known on the subject, we may assume that the only thing that prevented the great majority of colored people from buying and trading in one another, was, in addition to the law in some States, their lack of means," according to Watson's Magazine (1913).
In introducing his short work, Wilson writes:
"The most singular and dramatic aspect of slavery in the United States was the occasional ownership of bondsmen by free blacks. Historically, the facts are obscure, little known and difficult to trace; this phase is overlooked by historians, so far as I am aware, and is lost from the memories of most people of this generation..."
