Federal holiday

Today is the holiday “Juneteenth”, celebrating the end of slavery in the US.  I have a book “Slaves without Masters” by Ira Berlin about free Blacks in the American South before the Civil War. I am not very surprised that there were black people who were not slaves in the South before the Civil War but I had never thought about the possibility.

I knew about a New Yorker article, possibly in 1997 by Malcolm Gladwell, about the best runners and sprinters being Black. The book “The Great Stain” by Noel Rae has valuable information on sex between slaves and owners.