Disturbing Fact

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     It would be awhile before I would find the direct connection between slavery and abortion in America. While preparing and completing the research for VFV’s Prayer Walk for the state of Virginia. I really zoned into the fact that Virginia was both the birthplace of America and slavery. As I was reading the history of the song America! America the Beautiful... O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed His grace on thee, And crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea! It was first a poem by Katherine Lee Bates; (1859-1929). Her poem first appeared in print on July 4, 1895. After reciting those beautiful words, I thought to myself this was the most profoundly display of hypocrisy of those who sang the words of this song and believe in slavery or had slaves themselves.

     America was born in 1607 in Jamestown, Virginia and by 1619 so very early on America receives its first slaves in Jamestown, Virginia.  The first 19 or so Africans to reach the English colonies were brought by English privateers who had seized them from a captured Portuguese slave ship. The first ship of stolen African slaves was America’s test as a free nation to truly live out its claim of liberty and freedom given to all men from God. Would the new Settlers make good on their belief in the new free world and liberty for all men far away from their sufferings under England’s rule. Well, America miserable failed its test. For 258 years Americans proudly and legally kept their slaves. As America and the Colonists prospered they forgot their bondage of their former nation and established and enforced more permanent laws to ensure from generations to future generations America would have slaves.

     Remarkably, the greatest push back against slavery in America was the Church-Quakers and Puritans joined by many private Abolitionists groups as well as private citizens throughout all of America and Canada. The Quakers were among the first white people to denounce slavery in the American colonies. They formed what is known today as the Underground Railroad.  Many families assisted slaves in their travels through the Underground Railroad. The Quakers taught firey sermons about God’s wrath upon slave owners. The Quakers also refused to do business with those who own slaves and urging the boycott of the products of slave labor.  The Quakers would not honor or acknowledge Christian missionaries who own slaves. Quakers fought for the freedom for slaves in their churches, the halls of congress, marketplaces, fields, everywhere.

Quaker anti-slavery preaching came at a social cost. In the nineteenth-century United States, some Quakers were persecuted by slave owners. Quakers have been noted and, very often, praised for their early and continued antislavery fight. 

     On January 1, 1863, Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln the 16th President “All slaves in rebellion states shall be thenceforward, and forever free. It is known that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free a single slave. 

A Civil War later, America’s bloodiest battle on her soil slavery was abolished on December 18,      1865, finally 3 quarters of the states ratified and adopted the 13th Amendment, making slavery a crime. But it would take another 100 years for America to moved from slavery to racism using Jim Crow Laws. 

     Jim Crow Laws 1870-1965, these Laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern States South. All were enacted by white Democratic-dominated state legislatures after the Reconstruction period ending the Civil War. The laws were enforced until 1965.

     From the first slaves who arrived in 1619 to 1965, 346 years later, America have successfully taught her citizens that it is legally and morally acceptable to disregard the dignity of the life of another person for profit, gain and convenience. Thus, opening the door to the hearts already prepped and dull that allowed the killing of over 90 millions innocent American unborn babies in an act called abortion.