Bound by Constitution The Middle Passage was the second leg of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Between 1450 and 1867, approximately 10 million Africans between 27,000 voyages and 170 slave ships per year were transported to North America. These ships were chronically crowded and disease infested. The captives were forced to living conditions that included lying in human feces and menstrual fluid. Rapidly, typhoid fever, malaria, malnutrition and sometimes, sexual assault became the norm for the long trips across the Atlantic Ocean. The slavery era of the United States is called, today, by many historians, the ‘Peculiar Institution’, due to its inhumane structure and non-moralistic traits. In the same breath, however, one can say that the wonderful country we live in was built upon this horrendous period. Because of America’s ‘new’ workforce, economic development in the US was heavily pressed by the slave trade, especially with the rise of the Industrial Revolution. I am what some like me, would call “lucky”. As an African-American in the United States, society would say that I am supposed to live below the poverty line, my mother should be on welfare, my father in prison, and our home is either Section 8 or Project Housing. However, I am none of those things. My mother is the COO of a non-profit organization, my father is a retired football player turned realtor, and I reside in a promising upper-middle class neighborhood in Overland Park, Kansas. For my family members, and other African-Americans alike, however, the story is the same. Post-slavery brought many African-Americans to the cities of the North and because of the boom of factories grew in that region, black men were able to find work. Black women, however, were still stuck playing “mammy” for the upper-class white families. After the Harlem Renaissance, blacks were prospering, but by small numbers. And after World War II, those numbers barely got off the ground. During the 1950s and 1960s, the...