These two factors, as a consequence, went on to define the role of black people in America. The segment goes on to close with a brief overview of the Transatlantic Slave Trade — highlighting a tragic loss of human life: two of the 12 million slaves forced into slave ships never arrived to the New World.
Ellerbee begins the second segment with a discussion regarding the Founding Father's moral contradiction. Ironically, the very men who valued freedom and equality also justified owning other human beings. George Washington. Thomas Jefferson. James Madison. Benjamin Harrison. Even Patrick Henry, who was remembered as saying, "Give me liberty or give me death!" In response to this discovery, one of the child panelists responds with passionate frustration: "It is upsetting, because the Constitution states that it's freedom for all people and then it's like they lied about it all in a sense. They're saying liberty and freedom for all people, but then they don't mean it."
Nick News guest Dr. Cornel West manages to smooth over the emotional tempest, though, noting that "[a]s ugly as this [contradiction] is, this is not just white people as acting in this way, this is a human thing. There have been slave societies in all civilizations, even now." Later in the discussion, Dr. West would address the issues of slavery and race as America's most difficult dilemmas, saying that "[i]t's very difficult to confront the truth about ourselves. We'd rather deny it. We rather ignore it. We rather evade it, rather than confront it and engage it. And of course, sooner or later, we always have to engage it because of Civil War, the Civil Rights movement of 1960s, and in our own present day situation. We still got ‘vanilla suburbs' and ‘chocolate cities.' Where does that come from?"
In segment three, Ellerbee works to get to the heart of what it was like to be a slave. Acknowledging that "[t]here's no one alive, today, who was ever a slave," Ellerbee reveals a startling fact: one-half of the slaves in America were under 16 years old. With Nick News' young viewers in mind, what follows is a series of clips, taken from various books and government interviews, that weave together the experience of slavery from "the real words of real slaves who were real kids."
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