Slavery contradicted America’s founding ideology of equality from its birth

Evidence

From the day of its birth, the anomaly of slavery plagued a nation which asserted the equality of all men, and sought to derive powers of government from the consent of the governed. Within sound of the voices of those who said this lived more than half a million black slaves, forming nearly one-fifth of the population of a new nation, (p. 3)68 It was thus the black worker, as founding stone of a new economic system in the nineteenth century and for the modern world, who brought civil war in America. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 928

Categorization

• XREF: This founding contradiction links to standard accounts of American hypocrisy and to later treatments in the reader’s knowledge of US revolutionary history. — connects to: Some slaves demanded liberty by citing the Rights of Man.; Championing Indian rights inadvertently opened the door to African slavery; Americans glorified liberty radiating outward more than receiving the oppressed (+1 more)
• SHARE: The stark scale datum — half a million slaves, nearly one-fifth of the population at the founding — is a vivid statistic to cite.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 928

Broader Connections

• Some slaves demanded liberty by citing the Rights of Man. #exemplifies (0.80)