The information that the first shipment of white slaves arrived in Virginia before the first shipment of Africans, is correct, but does omit the prequel. Although the first load of officially designated whites for sale was not shipped to Virginia until 1619, whites who had been promised land in return for a term of servitude were already being bought and sold—even weighed on tobacco scales—in Jamestown by 1617, and poor whites had been owned outright by their masters through manipulation of indenture contracts earlier.

In fact, in 1609, there were known to be white slaves held by Indians in Virginia and Carolina, these being the survivors and descendents of the 1587 Roanoke expedition, which had been intentionally marooned by scheming investors who wished to found Jamestown. Captain John Smith discovered the existence of these marooned slaves –as he had been charged to do according to the Virginia Company Charter—but declined to report their survival, insisting they had died in the interior while knowing full well that they were the slaves of Indians. Also, at this time, thousands of English men were galley slaves on Spanish vessels and hundreds more were serving s castrated eunuchs in Islamic lands, as the English authorities permitted Barbary pirates and even Turkish slavers to cruise the English coast and seize the poor folk that the wealthy so wanted to be rid of.

The photo is of child slaves used in factories in the 1800s, who were often worked to death before age 12. These three are girls. The boys were used as coal donkeys in the mines—where the fuel that powered the textile mills were the other children worked was extracted—often dying of black lung before puberty. It is important to remember that the cotton harvested by black slaves in America was woven in England on man-eating machinery with no safety features, operated by children small enough to fit behind and inside of the ever moving steel machines.