DeSantis Faces Swell of Criticism Over Florida's New Standards for Black History

[tanyev]

5. Many slaves were valuable because they had knowledge U.S. farmers did not.

The journey of rice to the US is the journey of the people whose labour and knowledge led to its successful cultivation. Between 1750 and 1775, the bulk of more than 50,000 enslaved Africans were kidnapped from the aptly named Rice Coast, the traditional rice-growing region between Guinea and Guinea-Bissau and the western Ivory Coast where part of my African forebearers are from, and whose heart is in modern-day Sierra Leone and Liberia. Because rice was not indigenous to the Americas and plantation owners had no knowledge of how to grow it, enslaved Africans were brought to fuel its husbandry, feeding the US' eastern seaboard, Britain and provisioning many parts of the British Caribbean. In the antebellum South, if cotton was the king of commodities, then rice was the queen. And the queen brought incomparable economic power, transforming Charleston, and later Savannah, into thriving cosmopolitan ports.

The women who brought this know-how were precious cargo. In their heads rested more than four millennia of experience, from the days of rice being gathered wild to its domestication around 3,000 years ago. And in their wombs lay the potential for centuries of wealth for their slaveholders at the expense of human dignity and the US' "democratic experiment" their descendants would ironically lay the economic foundations of.

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210307-how-rice-shaped-the-american-south#:~:text=It%20built%20cities%20and%20fed,its%20cultivation%20to%20the%20US.