![famu-8221 An old photo of a main street with stores, one store's sign reads "Auction & Negro Sales."](https://familyvoices.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/famu-8221.jpg)
Within several decades of being brought to the American colonies, Africans were stripped of human rights and enslaved as chattel, an enslavement that lasted more than two centuries. Slavers whipped slaves who displeased them. Clergy preached that slavery was the will of God. Scientists “proved” that…