Thank you for writing this article, Fay. While researching my novel Restive Souls, which is set in an alternate timeline where the Brits emancipate the slaves in 1777, I learned that the opposite of what DeSantis and is cronies are promoting is true: The slaves of that era often possessed the most necessary skills of the day, and the whites of that day merely exploited them.

Many of these skills were possessed by the unheralded. For example, the slaves of the lowcountry rice fields brought their skills from Africa with them. The plantation owners who imprisoned them had no rice cultivation skills of their own.

Many others were architects and what would be today called construction managers. Slaves are said to have built Monticello.

I appreciate the rundown of each fact checked individual. I'll include this in my footnotes of research at the end of the book.