I’ve read a great deal about the Africa-to-Americas slave trade, yet have never seen a single historical account about uncommonly tall African slaves among the estimated 12 million Africans shipped to North and South America from the early 1700s through the mid 1800s. Although record-keeping was sporadic then, surely groups of uncommonly tall slaves would have merited some mention, certainly by slave merchants seeking competitive marketplace advantage and perhaps by newspapers looking for something interesting to print. One could argue that uncommon tallness is a recent, 20th/21st century phenomenon among all ethnic populations, mainly due to diet, and that the poor diets of American slaves restricted or negated genetic predispositions toward tallness. Various internet sources allege that the tallest ethnic groups in Africa are concentrated in the east, northeast, and central regions of the continent – this while recent genetic testing shows that the vast majority of present-day African-Americans trace their ancestry to west and southwest Africa, although we all know slavery supply networks reached deep into the continental interior. I suppose only a small subset of current African-Americans fall into the “exceptionally tall” category, yet surely some of their ancestors were statistical outliers in height, even if we assume that someone standing 6’ 4" in the year 1800 would have been considered uncommonly tall, perhaps on par with someone standing 6’ 8" today. As a side question, just how tall were Africans in the identified tall-statured areas prior to the America’s slave trade? Can we assume that at least some of these groups had sufficiently nutritious diets for them to achieve their genetic potential in height? In other words, surely there were isolated pockets of peoples in these identified areas who did have excellent diets and thus were uncommonly tall – perhaps even by today’s standards? If this sounds like I’m asking: Where were the Shaq O’Neals of 18 C. Africa, yes, I suppose I am, but within the broader context. (Note: John Rogan was the outlier’s outlier. His extreme height was undoubtedly due to a runaway pituitary disorder. His claimed height of 8’ 9 " was never credibly authenticated.)
Being 6’ 4" does not make someone a circus freak, though. Why were there no accounts of 8-footers, well, they are pretty rare even today.
A little Googling turned up this account of a 5’11” slave who was the tallest on his plantation:
(p. 159)
I found an article that only speaks in generalities, but offers some research
(My bold)
I’d note that many American slaves, after a few generations, had white blood in their bloodline, in addition to a mix of different African kingdoms. Few by the time of emancipation were “pure blooded”, especially as compared to an African person. It would be a mistake to try to equate the height of a particular American slave in 1800 America to some location in Africa; that person’s American lineage may have already gone back more than 100 years.
As I understand, the genetically “uncommonly tall” and thin Africans we read about today generally came from groups like the Masai, more local to eastern Africa (Kenya, Tanzania) rather than western Africa. Notable marathon runners come from that area.
The groups collecting slaves for the Europeans presumably understood that muscles, not tall and thin, were the criteria European buyers were looking for.
Another aspect of slavery I read about mentioned that in the deep south, cotton plantations experienced a burst of busy work during harvest season and very little to do other than occasional maintenance during the off season. This contributed to the use of slaves - for hired workers, they either got paid to do nothing for much of the year, or they’d leave to find year-round work elsewhere. The incentive for plantation owners was to keep costs down, mainly by feeding their slaves as little as possible during the off season. This is also why “being sold down the river” was such a bad thing - it meant being sent to work in the worst conditions, for the worst living conditions, and slaves there tended to die early. (IIRC, the author of 12 Years a Slave mentioned being hired out to do logging in the off season?)
(Also, “cotton-pickin’ hands” refered the the thick level of callouses built up on fingers from all the tiny pricks received from cotton when harvesting - another disincetive for hired labour)
It was a nasty and brutish system, all in all.
As luck would have it. just yesterday I heard about Pata Seca, a very tall (over 7 feet) and strong man who was used for breeding.
I believe that a tall slave was forced to breed a multitude of slave children. Brazil’s slave history is, somehow, even worse than American slave history.
But that video is a mess, worse than something from the History channel. Pata Seca (actual name Roque José Florêncio) did not live to be 130 years old. He probably wasn’t over 7 feet tall. He may have had 200 children, plus nine of his own. The narrator reveals at one point that no records exist of them, however, so their number and their later lives can’t be verified. How then could the narrator know that 30% of the city were his descendants? Contradictions exist. Pata Seca is said to have died of old age when his heart gave out, and of multiple diseases, and of inflection from a nail in his foot from an 19th century slave bed even though it was 1958. Salting a person’s life with random events between imaginary birth and death dates doesn’t prove anything. Nor does a picture of a man who is probably not even half of 130 years old.
Oral histories can be valuable looks at history that documents don’t show. Or they can be a series of tales that get exaggerated and fictionized over time. A quick, slight disclaimer at the end of 14 minutes of rapid patter doesn’t make up for the earlier stretching of truth.
I did a Google search on him. Every hit shares the same half dozen claims, but none provides what I would call evidence.
I believe that a tall slave was forced to breed a multitude of slave children. Everything after that is murky.
It’s not clear to me what you’re asking, but I’ve seen posters before saying things which implied that the most famous very tall Americans they knew were Black, so this must mean that Black American were on average taller than white ones. Actually, statistics I’ve seen say that the average Black American is slightly shorter (by about a third of an inch) than the average white American. The reason that the most famous very tall Americans they knew were very tall was that they watched a lot of professional basketball games. A higher proportion of Blacks play professional basketball than whites. This has nothing to do with any genetic tendency to be taller. It’s because basketball is more often played among school-age Blacks than school-age whites. What sport you play as a child has as much influence on what chance you have as an adult to play it professionally as your genetic background. For instance, a larger proportion of Canadians than of any other national group play professional hockey because that’s the most popular sport there, not because they are more genetically fit for playing it.
The picture for the video suggests the person does not fit our image of an unusually tall basketball player, either. Football, maybe.
Plus, at the risk of being crude, I don’t think the basketballer/marathoner physique was a great selling point in US slave markets - “he doesn’t have much upper body strength, but he can run long distances at great speeds…”
I’m curious what you read since I was under the impression that slaves were not necessarily well-fed or well housed. Most of the books I’ve read (and yes, they’re books, not the Internet, and not YouTube) paint a horrible picture. I wouldn’t conclude from height alone that America was a good place to live for everyone.
So if this is true, the Africans were captured and transported to the U.S. were no taller on average than the average white Americans. So there is very little average difference genetically in height between Black and white Americans. Again, if you think you know of more famous Black Americans who are very tall than white Americans, that has nothing to do with any average genetic tendencies toward height in Blacks rather than whites. It’s because you watch professional basketball games and know of more tall Blacks. That’s because basketball is more played by Black school children than white school children. Who plays professional sports has at least as much to do with what they grew up playing as their genetic physical trends.
It seems you believe modern African Americans have a remarkable “genetic potential [for] height”. They don’t. On average, by race, White Americans have always been slightly taller than non-whites. They still are.
Wendell Wagner, I had much difficulty following your points, but you and Bear Nenno fundamentally misunderstand my points. I shall return here in three days to explain.
To summarize -
Tall and thin human specimens are over-represented in basketball.
(Too tall and heavyset makes for broken ankles and slower moving for bball).
Many poor black players excel at basketball because that is the sport of choice and convenience in inner cities, and demands less equipment or complex specialized settings.
Hence, more of the tall and capable black players make it to the pro sports league, also since poor people have less alternative career options. The lure of pro sport riches also encourages more dedication and practice.
So tall, thin black players are over-represented in basketball, where they are visible and more prominent.
(And hefty, but not as tall, black football players are overrepresented for the same reason - for the poor with less education options, college and pro sports are a more attractive option when other avenues are difficult to achieve. The rich talented white kid can become a lawyer or doctor instead on daddy’s dime)
The excessively tall, thin Africans we note in the news - in Africa or recent immigrants - tend to come from the middle-northeast: Tanzania, Kenya, and Somalia. These are about as remote as you can get from the slave-trading ports in the Gulf of Guinea area of Africa. (It’s 2500 miles from Ghana to Kenya) The distance in between seems to be either near-desert or tropical jungle, less conducive to trade.
(The east coast slave trade was centered on places like Stonetown in Zanzibar and dealt with the Middle East (Arabia) and Persia, and never reach the industrial scale of the Western trade to the plantaitons of the Americas)
Hence, this population of taller thinner Africans is much less represented in the European slave trade to the Americas. The conclusion being that the apparent respresentation of tall thin black men in Basketball is a side effect of normal genetic variation, as Larry Bird could have told you.
As others have pointed out, the difference in height between African and European ancestry populations in America is minimal, in fact Europeans are marginally taller on average.
IIRC, there wasn’t really a lot of “selection” by the Africans collecting slaves for trading. They gained military superiority from trading for better weapons from the Europeans, then raided villages of rival ethhnic groups and took what they could, men, women and children.
The tallest people I’ve ever seen were in Denmark. Fwiw. And walking around tourist attractions in Denmark, i saw remarkably tall people all the time. Way more often than, say, walking around in Harlem, where i used to live.
By the way, walking around NYC in general, i saw an awful lot of extremes. The most beautiful people, the ugliest people, the tallest, shortest, most visibly deformed, thinnest, fattest, people dressed in expensive clothes and in rags… If you see enough people, you notice more extremes.
Wikipedia has an exhaustive compilation of heights by country, some measured, some self-reported.
Denmark is pretty high up, with an average male height of 5’11". The top goes to the Netherlands and Bosnia and Herzegovina, both at 6’ 1/2". They have the tallest women as well, at 5’ 7 1/2" and 5’7". The numbers are 5’ 10" and 5’5" for non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. Hispanic and Latino Americans are 5’ 7 1/2" and 5’ 2 1/2", which lowers the U.S. total average. African-Americans are 5’ 9 1/2" and 5’ 4 1/2".
Assuming that all groups follow a similar bell curve, the percentage of non-Hispanic whites and African-Americans at the far end should be fairly similar. In raw numbers non-Hispanic whites 7’ or over should be several times that of African-Americans: they are four times the population and have that slight height edge. Same is true for those 6’ 6" or over, a more numerous segment of the NBA.
As said above, I don’t know of any evidence to support a claim that black slaves from disproportionately tall groupings were brought over or were forced into breeding stock in America. Some cultural reason must be behind tall American blacks disproportionately choosing to play basketball.
But in recent years, international basketball has been more popular and therefore requiring better skills. That’s seen an influx of extremely talented supertall Europeans, both black and white. If height and tall are the determiners for basketball, then the ratio of white players to black players should rise, even if more black players from outside the U.S. continue to play.
I’m reading rebuttals to points I never made in my OP and clarifying comments on points I clearly stated. Nowhere did I suggest African-Americans as a group are taller than non-AA’s, then or now. To wit, I used the phrase “uncommonly tall” twice in my first two sentences and five times in my OP. I also mentioned “outliers,” noted dietary changes, identified pockets of uncommonly tall populations in NE, E, and south-central Africa (which I identified outside the typical slave-capturing regions), etc.
However, in my OP, it should read: “Although record-keeping was sporadic then, surely uncommonly tall slaves would have merited some mention, certainly by slave merchants seeking competitive marketplace advantage and perhaps by newspapers looking for something interesting to print.”
I was not painting a picture of dozens of slave ships loaded with eight-footers arriving in antebellum Charleston across the decades.
And yes, I had assumed, without stating the obvious, that there were corresponding proportions of uncommonly tall white settlers in the Colonies, as well. I will concede that uncommonly tall, gangly slaves probably weren’t an easy sell, but I do imagine significant numbers of outlying ethnic groups, some very tall, were caught in the vast dragnet and shipped to the Colonies.
I will clarify. Given the large (but not disproportionate) numbers of tall African-American males and females today – as seen, currently or formerly, in high school through college and professional sports (and elsewhere in society, sigh) – surely some numbers of rather tall African slaves arrived in the Colonies from the 1620s to the 1810, yet there is no mention of any such individuals in gigabytes of scholarly research, newspaper accounts, biographies, autobiographies, oral histories, or elsewhere. Again, as noted in my OP, Americans of all ethnicities are significantly taller today than people in the colonial era, but still … there’s no mention of tall slaves (i.e. outliers) during this period, other than the one 5 foot 11 inch slave noted above. From the points made by others, and that I presupposed without actually writing in my OP, I guess we are to infer that tall African-American men today (say, 6 foot 6 inches to 7 feet tall, or taller) trace their African lineages to persons in the 1700s who were perhaps a full foot shorter, as noted in statistics provided elsewhere in this thread? And are we to conclude that one reason why uncommonly tall slaves weren’t mentioned in historical accounts is that being very tall was (a) not of significance to market-minded slave traders and (b) was not any more common statistically than among white Americans, so no one felt it relevant to write about it – even in the case of a 6 foot 7 inch “outlier” working the fields of Georgia? That’s never, ever mentioned, not once. (It’s reminiscent of the old saying: A 6 foot 7 inch white farmer is intriguing, but a 6-foot 7-inch slave for sale in New Orleans will bring spectators to the docks in droves.)
Thank you, MORIARTY, very interesting. Does Steckel note actual heights? My readings suggest the diets of slaves depended on local supply, climate, and who owned them. Typically, slaves were allowed or forced to grow their own crops, but meat was often limited and inferior cuts.
Yes, and the ancestors of white people today who are 6’6" to 7’ tall also have ancestors who are considerably shorter. The fact that your height is considerably different from the average of your ancestors a dozen generations back is not remotely surprising. The standard formula for estimating the height of the child of a woman who is X tall and a man who is Y tall is as follows: If the child is a boy, he will probably be about ((X+Y)/2) + 2.7’" tall. If the child is a girl, she will probably be about ((X+Y)/2) - 2.7" tall. By saying that he or she will be about that tall, I mean that most of such children will be within about 2" of that height. A very large proportion of such children will be within about 4" of that height. An extremely large proportion of such children will be within about 6" of that height. A very small proportion of such children will be more than 6" different from that height. The fact of someone being very tall or very short proves almost nothing about the heights of their ancestors a dozen generations back.
I see no reason to believe that slave holders cared very much about the heights of their slaves and felt it necessary to make notes about those heights.
This is probably the notable part - there was no great reason for slave owners to describe their slave’s characteristics, especially if they were just one of many. People might talk about their circle of friends, or notable people (Abraham Lincoln was allegedly tall and thin - “gangly”) but presumably slaves rarely/never figured into such discussions, being individually unimportant. The only description of relevance to the owners would be how strong - musculature.
Also, I suppose, to what extent would “uncommonly tall” (i.e. random genetic variation) also depend on a good diet. Maybe, we see a lot of taller people today because all through childhood those with the genetic propensity also get an excellent diet - something less common in that time and place.
Also, importation of slaves was forbidden after 1808 - so any “uncommonly tall” slaves discussed in times maybe 20 years later on would have mostly been locally born. Particularly, in times leading up to the Civil War, most slaves would be locally born. Again, slave owners tended to not go to excesses in feeding slaves - presumably especially children, who were not notably productive.
So here are two examples I found:
Ben “Big Ben” Johnson was said to be an escaped slave between 7 and 8 feet tell, with feet as big as Shaquille O’Neal.
And there is a woman who grew to over 7 feet, although she wasn’t a slave, since she was born a little less than a year after slavery was outlawed in America. But, as you might imagine, her parents were enslaved.
She toured as a performer, mainly in Europe.