On black slaveowners in the Old Dominion, see Philip Schwarz,
"Emancipators, Protectors, and Anomolies: Free Black Slaveowners in
Virginia," The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 95, No.
3 (Jul., 1987), pp. 317-338. I guess it depends on how you define
"significant," but this article demonstrates that the total number of
slaveholders among blacks in Virginia was tiny, especially when compared
to overall white slave ownership, and that it declined over time.
Outside of small areas of New Orleans and Charleston, the same can be
said of the rest of the South. In my view, giving white and black
slaveholding equal billing in text books would be ridiculous, although
contextualizing it within the larger experience of slavery, as Schwarz
does,  would be fine with me. 

This article and others like it have another saluatory element.  It
demolishes the claim, common on the internet, that black slaveownership
is some kind of historical secret that "liberals" or "left-wing
academics" don't want you to know.  Schwarz builds on the work of
pioneering black historians, several of them Virginians, who documented
this phenomena more than a half-century ago.  Schwarz's scholarship and
many other books and articles are readily available.  There is no
conspiracy to "hide the truth."

Expanding the discussion of slavery to the North is a laudable goal.  I
used the online component of the New York Historical Society's recent
exhibition on slavery in New York the last time I taught a university
course on American cities as an adjunct. I don't know how this is
handled in textbooks these days, but of course such a discussion might
occur much earlier in a chronological narrative than a description of
the Cotton South. 

Gregg

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