Slavery was a Southern phenomenon, and Southern slave owners were Democrats. The Republican Party was founded for the express purpose of ending slavery, and it did, at the cost of 320,000 dead young white men. Freed slaves who came north married and raised families, and were, in time, working class people like most of their neighbors. In seventy years, from 1865 to 1935, one lifespan, the descendants of those Republican voting freed slaves began to realign themselves with their former owners, the Democrats, and willingly and enthusiastically returned to the Democrat slave plantation, again dependent on their Democrat owners for their very existence. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

The Guinea coast, the barracoons
The misery, the stink
The slaver’s ship, laid down like spoons
The manacle, iron link
The passage west, unending night
The dark and foul filled hold
No room to move, no end in sight
The dead lay still and cold
The auction block, the bidders’ jokes
Hosed down, the captives wait
Surrounded by the laughing folks
Determining their fate
And then one day a distant drum
To shouts of Jubilee
They saw the Union soldiers come
And Lordy they were free
But that was then and this is now
In geologic blink
Descendants of those slaves allow
The manacle and link