Karen Bass: “As chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, along with my fellow CBC colleagues, I am pleased to join Congresswoman…”

“As chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, along with my fellow CBC colleagues, I am pleased to join Congresswoman Barbara Lee, Congressman Bobby Scott, and Congresswoman Alma Adams for this CBC Special Order hour. Tonight, my colleagues and I will take the time to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved Africans arriving in the United States. The transatlantic slave trade was the largest coerced migration of human beings in the history of the world. An estimated 10 to 12 million enslaved Africans were transported across the Atlantic Ocean between the 16th and 19th centuries. The brutality, murder, rape, disease, and starvation were so high that some historians assess that around 15 to 25 percent of the enslaved Africans died aboard slave ships. Slavery in the United States officially lasted from 1619 to 1865, or 246 years. Enslaved Africans worked 10 or more hours a day, in dangerous conditions, and also worked 18-hour days in peak cotton- picking and sugar harvest season. The average lifespan of enslaved Africans who labored on sugar and rice plantations was only 7 years. Violence on the plantations was always a danger and threat to the lives of enslaved human beings. Wealth from the enslaved Africans and their labor established global capitalism and set the economic foundation for Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas.…”