 Africans
worked in nearly every trade you can imagine. They were shipwrights,
blacksmiths, carpenters, brickmasons, tailors and shoemakers.
They worked in homes as cooks, nannies, laundresses and house
servants. Africans tended livestock, drove carriages and wagons
and farmed. Everywhere you looked in 18th-century America, a
man or woman of African heritage was near at hand, helping to
build these English colonies into strong communities. And though
these black men and women toiled, as slaves they reaped none
of the benefits of their labor. |
