Michele Bachmann signed a really tone-deaf pledge from a conservative religious organization in Iowa that declares that:
Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President.
Yeah, rather than take this too seriously, I'll just quote Robert George who I think had an appropriately mocking response in noting, "Black unemployment? Also low then, too!"
A good rule of thumb for empathizing with black Americans is avoiding suggestions that we were better off as property.