Letter: DeSantis and Slavery

Ron DeSantis says that slavery had a benefit for the enslaved by teaching them a skill. Bull. What if they didn’t want to practice a skill like picking cotton in the blazing sun until death for the benefit of slavemasters, not themselves? In a free and fair society they might have practiced a skill that was more suited for them. How about the skill of being a scientist or engineer who might have discovered something or built something that benefitted others? Where were the possible doctors and lawyers who were buried in cotton fields and sweat? The poets and artists that never were? The philosophers and the saints who died under hard labor by force with no hope, kept there by terror and torture or the threat thereof? I mourn the people who never had the chance to practice a skill for their own profit. I mourn for America, our country, that lost the benefit these people could have brought but for greed and sometimes cruelty of slave holders.