Slavery is a part of America’s dark history, but there’s a part of slavery that makes America’s history even darker—the slave breeding farms.
Rapper and activist Immortal Technique (Felipe Andres Coronel) did an interview on the Empire Files and posted it Feb. 8, where he talked about his research for his upcoming album, The Middle Passage, the information on the torment slaves went through, specifically the slave breeding plantations.
“They’ve shown us every plantation with cotton on it,” the rapper said. “You know what plantation they’ve never shown us? The most prominent ones. The ones that were most profitable. The breeding plantations. Why don’t you want to show us those? You know why? Because after the research that I did for this album, you realize that the moment that a girl menstruated, she was put in a stable where a horse would be and forcibly raped by a male of the slave master’s choice. And when she had children, they weren’t called children. They were called the litter of pups.”
Slave breeding farms or plantations aren’t taught in most schools in America for obvious reasons. Nonetheless, it doesn’t detract from being one of American history’s worst characteristics.
A stomach-churning fact is that how the slave breeding farms operated proved that African Americans weren’t seen as humans but as property.
Slave breeding was the masters’ method of producing more workers without needing to purchase more enslaved people. They’d force an enslaved man with traits they desired the upcoming slave child to have that benefited the owners’ land to have sex with an enslaved woman against her will.
Authors of The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave Breeding Industry, Ned and Constance Sublette, coined it the “capitalized womb.”
According to a YouTube video from the Black Journals, about 70 breeding farms were in operation at the height of their popularity. There were also sex farms overseen by plantation owners, where young enslaved women were forced to either have sex with an enslaved man or with a slave owner.
The gruesome truth surrounding slave breeding is that Black women were often subjected to sexual abuse and violence and couldn’t defend themselves.
One example of these horrors was in the case of an enslaved woman named Celia, who was tried, convicted of murder and sentenced to death for murdering plantation owner and rapist Robert Newsom of Missouri, who impregnated her and refused to acknowledge the baby as his.
Since the enslaved were seen as props, it’s a given that many times, the enslaved women were separated from their children, whom owners sold for a profit because they were deemed more “profitable” than adult slaves.
While many babies were produced from slave breeding, it’s imperative to note that there were high infant mortality rates due to the lack of care. Enslaved women were subjected to long hours of fieldwork after birth. Therefore, they couldn’t care for their offspring.
Black women were sometimes given medical care during their pregnancies but not for their well-being. Plantation owners recruited doctors to examine the pregnant Black mothers to maintain their ability to produce more children for masters to sell. But many of these white doctors operated on Black pregnant women for procedures like fixing fistulas without administering anesthesia because they believed slaves didn’t experience pain like white people.
