African-American slave owners

"[1] Slave owners included a comparatively small number of people of at least partial African ancestry in each of the original Thirteen Colonies and later states and territories that allowed slavery;[2][3] in some early cases, black Americans also had white indentured servants.It has been widely claimed that an African former indentured servant who settled in Virginia in 1621, Anthony Johnson, became one of the earliest documented slave owners in the mainland American colonies when he won a civil suit for ownership of John Casor.[6] According to Rachel Kranz: Durnford was known as a stern master who worked his slaves hard and punished them often in his efforts to make his Louisiana sugar plantation a success.The historians John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger wrote: A large majority of profit-oriented free black slaveholders resided in the Lower South."[14] The historian James Oakes, in 1982, stated that: [t]he evidence is overwhelming that the vast majority of black slaveholders were free men who purchased members of their families or who acted out of benevolence".