Muslims have been in North America for Centuries

You can click on this picture to enlarge it.

She was still living in bondage in the early 1860's, when this picture was taken.

Even 40 years after being being kidnapped from Africa, people were still asking for a Qur’an.

According to the late Professor John Blassingame, writing in his book, The Slave Community, some of the Africans who were enslaved, in the U.S. South, were Muslims. They could read and write Arabic.

Even 40 years after being kidnapped into slavery, some of these Muslims were still pleading with the slaveholders to see a Qur’an.

Some slaveholders read English-language Qur’ans to those Muslims, until they learned English. Then the slaveholders replaced the Qur’an with the Bible.

--Professor Blassingame cites “The Autobiography of Omar ibn Said, Slave in North Carolina in 1831”, from the American Historical Review XXX (1925), pages 787-795, and several other sources.
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Professor John W. Blassingame (1940-2000), Yale University.
His book, entitled "Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies", has been called the best collection of primary sources about the slave experience in a single volume.

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