Question

What does J. Saunders Redding mean when he writes, “Probably no ship in modern history has carried a more portentous freight.”?

Answer 1

• Black American writer, J. Saunders Redding. “She came, she traded, and shortly afterwards was gone. Probably no ship in modern history has carried a more portentous freight. Her cargo? Twenty slaves."
• From her book,Drawing The Color line; “the color line” is a problem in our country more than any other country. Is it possible for whites and blacks to live together without hatred.There is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States.
• Some historians think those first blacks in Virginia were considered as servants, like the white indentured servants brought from Europe. But the strong probability is that, even if they were listed as "servants", they were viewed as being different from white servants, were treated differently, and in fact were slaves.
• Virginia had a geography that made it difficult to extract resources from the land. It was tough on European settlers to scrape a living together. Redding wrote during the 1600s. Virginia was still a fledgling colony, then. It is important to note that 1600s' Virginia was in its early stages of development. Colonists looked to survive, initially, not profit.
• Slavery and interaction with the natives planted the seeds for revolution in the British North American colonies. To have slavery was to go against everything that Britain stood for, for she had ridded herself of the evils of slavery nearly 200 years prior to the United States. This proves that preserving a way of life justified revolution. Reacting to pressures of living in North America demonstrated that slavery was essential.
• In any case, slavery developed quickly into a regular institution, into the normal labor relation of blacks to whites in the New World. With it developed that special racial feeling,whether hatred, or contempt, or pity, or patronization that accompanied the inferior position of blacks in America for the next 350 years,that combination of inferior status and derogatory thought we call racism.
• From Redding's perspective as a black man, one gets a sense of foreboding that the institution of slavery was an institution that was going to stay in America for many years. Redding would have never imagined that it would last for 200 years.