Africans went to live in America for quite different reasons from the white settlers. These black people were forcibly taken from their native land. They had no choice where they lived or where they worked. They were prisoners of the dreadful system of slavery that put them entirely at the mercy of white Americans. The Americans did not invent slavery. Slavery had existed in Africa for thousands of years. In Europe the great Roman Empire had depended on millions of slaves. From the fifteenth century many other countries in the Americas had slavery. Many black British people are descendants of the slaves who lived in the Caribbean islands, such as Jamaica and Barbados.

Nigel Smith: Black peoples of the Americas; Oxford University Press, 1992/2000, page 6