What Group of People Was Taken to America and Sold as Slaves? Civics Question 75

The answer is Africans, or people from Africa.

Question 75 asks what group of people was taken and sold as slaves. Say “Africans” or “people from Africa.” Both are accepted. The question is about the people who were taken from Africa by force and sold in the American colonies and later in the United States.

What Happened

Starting in the 1600s, ships carried people from Africa across the Atlantic Ocean to the American colonies. They did not choose to come. They were seized, held below deck for the length of the crossing, and sold when they landed.

Under colonial and then American law they were treated as property. They worked without pay, most of them on farms in the southern colonies and later the southern states, and children born to enslaved mothers were held in the same condition. Enslaved people were bought and sold, and sales split husbands from wives and parents from children.

Slavery was legal in the United States for most of the country’s first century. It ended with the 13th Amendment in 1865, after the Civil War.

Why the Officer Asks This

Slavery runs through much of the rest of the history section. It shaped arguments at the Constitutional Convention, it was central to the Civil War, and it is the reason for three amendments passed after that war. Several questions on the list connect back to this one, so the answer here carries forward.

How to Remember the Answer

The answer is a place, and the place is Africa. Both accepted answers contain that word, so the word is the thing to hold.

What to Say on Test Day

Say “Africans.” One word.

“People from Africa” is accepted and works just as well. Keep the word Africa in whatever you say, then stop. No dates, no detail, and nothing else is asked for here.