Editor's note: Lynn Wheeler, president of Wheeler Communication Group, LLC, and former Charlotte mayor pro tem, is on a weeklong civil rights tour led by Julian Bond.

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Day 5:
Most of our day was spent on the bus, traversing the Mississippi Delta from Greenwood to New Orleans, with a brief stop for lunch in Natchez.

The highlight was a 45-minute lecture on slavery by Julian Bond. As you may know, Bond is currently a professor of history at the University of Virginia, and this lecture represents one of the classes he teaches.

Bond said that he is a descendent of slaves on both sides of his family tree. On his father’s side, his grandfather was born a slave in Kentucky in 1863.

“He and his mother were property, like a horse or a chair,” he told our group. “As a young girl, she had been given away as a wedding present to a new bride, and when that bride became pregnant, her husband -- that’s my great-grandmother’s owner and master -- exercised his right to take his wife’s slave as his mistress. From that union came two children, one of them my grandfather.”

On Bond’s mother’s side, his great-grandmother was also a slave. She remembered that her grandfather was an Irishman, and in a conversation with Bond said once related to him how the slave system worked:

“You know when a white man would marry, his father would give him a woman as a cook, and she would have children right in the house by him. A white woman would have a maid sometimes who was nice looking, and then would keep her, and her son would have children by her. My master had 25 slaves up here in Tennessee, but I recon he had thousands in Mississippi, and lots of them were his children. His children had to work just like we did and they had to call him Master too, and the overseer would take them down and whip them like the others.”

At a minimum, Bond said, 50 million Africans were captured and exported to the West. At least 11 million came to America, and 11 million more died being captured, stored or crowded onto slave ships. Te slave trade was lucrative, with profits reaching 100 percent.

Tomorrow is our final day. In New Orleans we will have speakers addressing Katrina and the racial incidents that took place there.

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