Slavery: Then and Now When we think about slavery many things come to our mind. There are many different ways one can describe slavery. If you were to look it up in a dictionary it would say that a slave is “one who is owned and forced into service by another,” this was the definition given in the Webster’s Dictionary. But then again if you were to look it up in the Oxford Dictionary the definition given here is of one who is an “obsessive devotee.” On the whole slavery can have different meanings to different people. The meaning of slavery has a different meaning today than it did years ago. As Alex Haley wrote, slavery was difficult to explain years ago because it was going on at