So I thought, " Well, maybe these members of Congress were slaveholders."

所以我想，“好吧，也许这些国会成员是奴隶主。”

Taylor, as we have said, was a slaveholder. But he believed that both California and New Mexico should be free states.

正如我们所说，泰勒是个奴隶主，但他认为加利福尼亚和新墨西哥都应该是自由州。

Lincoln had originally proposed gradual emancipation and planned to  compensate the slaveholders for their losses.

林肯最初提出逐步解放，并计划补偿奴隶主的损失。

Four of them had been slaveholders.

其中四人曾是奴隶主。

White slaveholders would have had little interest in reporting such news nor would they have likely accepted Lincoln's order as lawful.

南方奴隶主根本没有任何兴趣报道这样的新闻，他们也不认可林肯的法令是合法的。

To this day, black people are forced to confront monuments of slaveholders in our public spaces.

时至今日，黑人仍被迫在我们的公共场所面对奴隶主的纪念碑。

They were also there to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation, basically to make sure that these slaveholders actually were paying their newfound labor.

他们还在当地执行《解放黑人奴隶宣言》，基本上是为了确保这些奴隶主确实为他们新获得的劳动力支付了薪水。

Another movement for change -- Bird Names for Birds -- is to stop using names of birds that honor slaveholders and white supremacists.

为了做出改变的另一做法是——鸟类名字专用——停止用鸟类的名字纪念奴隶主和白人种族优越主义者。

There are people who are descendants of some of these congressmen who are looking to see whether they had slaveholders in their ancestry.

有些人是这些国会议员的后代，他们想知道他们的祖先中是否有奴隶主。

And so I'm saying this because literally slaveholders, slave traders, imagined that their ideas in our terms were not racist.

所以我这么说是因为从字面上看， 奴隶主、奴隶贩子认为他们的想法用我们的话说不是种族主义。