Without generalizing about the personal feelings of the African American intelligentsia about a topic as broad as this, the history of black African involvement in the transatlantic slave trade neither was nor needed to be disregarded by those who took the view that they were kidnapped from their African homeland and oppressed by Europeans. In large part this was because the original kidnapping was the least (though first) of the charges leveled by those intellectuals against America, foremost among which was the continued systematic oppression which black people were experiencing in America at that time. The kidnapping of Africans may have been the 'but for' cause of that oppression, but the choice of American society of the time to oppress was what was being complained of, not just a long-past historical wrong.

On one level, because the nature of chattel slavery as practiced in the New World (with the dehumanization which was particularly unique to it) was different than what was practiced in Africa before Europeans began the transatlantic slave trade in earnest. Slaves had opportunity to become free in their lifetime (e.g. the Islamic tradition of freeing slaves on the 'owner's' death) and, in the absence of need for plantation labor, their skills were more likely to be utilized (e.g. their being allowed to work as artisans and be respected for their skill rather than being seen as invariably lesser beings). So, if one wanted to, it was possible to argue that African tribes and nations at first didn't know about just what sort of slavery they were dooming those they captured at wars to. [Though it is important to note that slavery in Africa was definitely terrible the plantations of the Americas gave it a different character]

Later, when the rate of enslavement didn't meet European demand, one could argue they were manipulated to enslave others as European powers provided weapons to encourage war (and the enslavement that came with it).

On another level even if one were to say that African people engaged in selling other Africans into chattel slavery with full knowledge of what that meant, black American Civil Rights leaders and intellectuals would not have been conflicted in laying the blame for the condition of their people at the feet of American whites. The involvement of Africans was one-time and entirely economic - the selling of a captive into slavery in exchange for weapons or money. The involvement of whites was on a societal level for centuries and was largely aimed at dehumanizing slaves, stripping from them their language, culture, family, and education. How this happened in the context of chattel slavery is well documented and (hopefully) well known. But this societal-level denigration continued after the Civil war, particularly when Reconstruction ebbed and Jim Crow laws were instituted across the South.

The continued insistence of society on preventing black people from getting similar opportunities (to say nothing of treatment) to whites, and the unwillingness of white society to even let black people mind their own business on their own terms, particularly while proclaiming itself to be equal, often sparked the black American intellectuals in the first place. Malcolm X, in his autobiography, recalls vividly how influenced he was by seeing the mistreatment his father received but also the greater deference he was shown by his family due to his comparatively lighter skin color. Many of his ideas flow from observation of this, then-contemporary, colonization of black American thought and values by white society. Some examples he talks about include: the extreme lengths he (and others) would go to to have hair that was straight like a white person's, the fact that no black history was taught in school other than the generalization that blacks were lazy, how despite being an outstanding student who wanted to be a lawyer that path was never opened to him while being laid before many of his less-talented white classmates, and many others. Among American society's evils were two great ones: that it made black people feel so (falsely) inferior at their core that the only way they could conceptualize something 'good' was to emulate whiteness, a whiteness which, when push came to shove, would always reject them as lesser no matter how much they achieved; and that it was hypocritical in pretending that it was a fair, equal, and just society rather than doing as South Africa did and acknowledging the apartheid it practiced.

In sum, the primary complaints of many mid-century American civil rights leaders and intellectuals were less focused on having once had an ancestor enslaved and more on having had most culture and traditions stripped away and being held to an unequal, oppressed, and inferior role in society at the time of the Civil Rights struggle. As such, Africa's temporary involvement in the slave trade was not a barrier to finding in it the cultural, linguistic, and intellectual traditions which enslaved Africans and their descendants were denied in America.

For further reading:

• Autobiography of Malcolm x as told to Alex Haley (for a near-first-person view of Malcolm's thoughts at some periods of his life);

• Various writings by James Baldwin (for more first-person accounts of Black-intellectual thought of the time), e.g.: The Fire Next Time, Letter from a Region in My Mind.

• Many Thousands Gone by Ira Berlin;

• Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South by Michael A. Gomez;

• Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa by Paul E. Lovejoy