- Nearly half a million Africans survived the Middle Passage, eventually arriving in the United States. But a second Middle Passage, inside our country, was over twice as large in scale. The domestic slave trade fueled the nation's booming cotton economy and, in the process, shattered black families.

After Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793, cotton exploded as a cash crop.

- You have this technological innovation. The cotton gin makes it quicker, easier to separate the seed from the cotton bowl itself, and you also have the Louisiana Purchase, and the seizing of indigenous Native American land. As a result of that, you have this new land in the West. You have a demand for cotton and a demand for labor.

- Slave owners from states of the upper South sold their slaves to traders, who then transported them to the cotton producing states in the deeper South and further to the West. This came to be known as the Second Middle Passage, and its effects on the African American community would be devastating.

- They were forcibly sold, separated from families, husbands from wives, parents from children, siblings from one another, forced to make these trips chained and bound together and clearing the way for settlement of white Americans.

- About a million slaves moved between these older states and the newer states in the South over the course of three decades in the 19th century. So there's this massive slave trade, domestically, that attends the opening up of the cotton territories and the rise of the cotton kingdom in the South.

- Countless families became the victims of the largest forced migration in our country's history. But there were huge profits to be made off of black bodies. Once they arrived at their destination, families that had made the journey together often were ripped apart.

- As the slave trade did in Africa, the domestic slave trade scrambles any kind of community that Black people had come to know, and it leads to this new round of massive alienation and forced them to start all over again.

- This horrendous dislocation lasted until the Civil War began. But the consequences of the Second Middle Passage devastated generations of black families.

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