ere thought to be a danger to high class, Americans ostracized blacks. Discrimination against Negroes was no new practice, and blacks earned a degraded position in society from their very first arrival.
             Degler highlights the differences between the way Negroes were treated in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies of South America from the way they were handled in the New England colonies of North America. He does so to point out that while enslaving Africans was not unique to North America, the inferior image and harsher living conditions given to the Negro was, and this degradation continued some forty years after the arrival of the first Negroes until slavery was put into the law. "In the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, slavery did not leave upon the freed Negro anything like the prejudicial mark which it did in the United States," historian Frank Tannenbaum stated (Degler pg. 49). This proves that prejudice against the Negro in fact was in place long before slavery was legally established, therefore the institution of African slavery forty years after the arrival of the blacks can be attributed to the intensifying racism that the Americans developed towards the black race in those years.
             Historians Oscar and Mary Handlin argu
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