Where did your last name come from? If youâ??re African-American, it is probably the family name of the white people who owned your ancestors hundreds of years ago. Or it may have come about as the kind of work your ancestors were forced to do when they were enslaved (like Cook or Baker). One way or another, we can literally refer to most of our last names as â??slave namesâ??. When people argue that we need to get over slaveryâ?¦ that it didnâ??t happen to us or anyone that we knowâ?¦ few consider the impact it still has on us today. That among the many ways we still carry the burden of our ancestors, the most obvious is what we call ourselves. Back in Africa, was our last name Jackson, Johnson, Smith, Hamilton or Jones? Were we the Nelsons of Sierra Leone or the Hendersons of Ghana? We may not have any idea what our names were before our elders were crammed into slave ships, but we can say with 100% certainty that the names we bear today werenâ??t the true names of our ancestors pre-slavery. https://www.youtube.com/redirect?redir_token=mb9c3lqLzpgOzy0oCM_sQhCoPXJ8MTUwODgxNDI5OEAxNTA4NzI3ODk4&event=video_description&v=Ve2CLlYp4bI&q=http%3A%2F%2Fblacktoafricamovement.com%2Fwhats-your-slave-name%2F