Some individuals, sure. The Harlem Renaissance, OK. But mostly it's just a long stretch of missed opportunities, bad behavior, and demands that white people help them. I look at Africa. I look at the Caribbean. I look at US cities. I see very little history that anyone should be proud of.
Black slaveholders. An unpopular truth:
Born a slave in 1790, William Ellison owned 63 slaves by 1860, making him one of Charleston’s leading slaveholders. In the 1850 census for Charleston City, the port of Charleston, there were 68 black men and 123 black women who owned slaves. In Louisiana’s St. Landry Parish, according to the 1860 census, black planter Auguste Donatto owned 70 slaves and farmed 500 acres of cotton fields.
Black slaveholders were the exception to the rule, but so, too, were white ones. Only a small minority of Southern whites owned slaves, little more than five percent of the white population if calculated by individual owner, or some 20 to 25 percent if all the members of the slave owners’ families are included. This means that 75 percent or more of Southerners neither owned slaves themselves nor were members of families who did.