Hello, 

                Race tension and discrimination between whites and African Americans was not in colonial America at the start. The colonists initially relied on indentured servants and enslaved American Indians to do the manual labor required to sustain. This slowly began to change as indentured servitude began to fall out of favor after the Bacon rebellion, outlawing most indentured servitude. In search of source of labor, the colonists began tapping into the already present slave trade in West Africa. The colonists began shipping these slaves over to the Americas in the thousands. Even when these Africans slaves first arrived there were treated with respect and had some rights, but as time went on and the slaves became more and more valuable they lost their rights. Colonists no longer saw the slaves as people anymore, but saw them as a commodity. The colonists began passing laws that secured their power of the slaves, and in turn stripped them of things that made them human. This is truly when race discrimination of the African Americans started, as the colonists stripped them of their rights and used them for profit.


Article used http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-02-03.htm