Editor, Gazette-Journal:

This letter is in response to Peggy Newsome’s letter (“What ideas does he mean?” Nov. 17 Readers Write).

That’s right. I believe in teaching the good, the bad and the ugly. Slavery has never been good for anybody. Fellow man has enslaved one another since the beginning of time. Just pick a group of people—they have been enslaved by their own or others by skin color, religion, etc. Slavery was a big part of the Roman Empire class system. I believe the Jewish people were slaves the longest. Africans were slaves for approximately 247 years; not the shortest and not the longest.The Dutch and Portuguese started the slave trade in America. A group of Africans from the Horn of Africa started selling their own people and slaves they took from other tribes.

Even in this country, blacks owned slaves. You had free Africans in the South that had plantations with African slaves on them.

The English flag flew over slavery in the New World for approximately 177 y...