On August 20, 1619–400 years ago tomorrow–a ship named the White Lion docked at Point Comfort, Virginia, and began selling its cargo to the some 700 settlers who then inhabited the British colony of Jamestown. The cargo consisted of the surviving 20 out of an original 350 African captives, kidnapped by the Portuguese from the native Kongo and Ndongo kingdoms, who had survived the arduous transatlantic voyage and then been captured by a plundering ship near Virginia. These twenty people, stolen from their homes and families and transported to a new and unfamiliar continent across the world, began the African population of the American colonies.
Those 20 humans and their millions of descendants would remain in slavery, bought and sold as chattel, for another two-and-a-half centuries, after which they would be denied the full rights of citizens for yet another century, and would continue to struggle for acceptance and equal opportunity for the remaining half century of their residence in this country.
According to the History website,
“The arrival at Point Comfort marked a new chapter in the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which began in the early 1500s and continued into the mid-1800s. The trade uprooted roughly 12 million Africans, depositing roughly 5 million in Brazil and over 3 million in the Caribbean. Though the number of Africans brought to mainland North America was relatively small—roughly 400,000—their labor and that of their descendants was crucial to the economies of the British colonies and, later, the United States.”
The History site also clarifies that technically these 20 people were sold as indentured servants, as were many people from Europe, which means that they would work without pay for a set time in order to pay off their indebtedness and then would gain their freedom. Some in fact were eventually freed; however, as the flourishing southern cash crops demanded great numbers of cheap workers, slavery grew into the institution which was finally ended by President Lincoln 246 years later, but only after a bloody civil war which cost our country roughly 620,000 of its citizens, both black and white. That number is only slightly fewer than the number killed in all of our other wars and conflicts combined (644,000).
Though proponents of the Lost Cause Mythology argue that slavery was not the central cause of the Civil War, that mythology has been debunked by evidence from respected historians. What the Lost Cause folks want us to believe was a battle over states’ rights, others make clear was really a confrontation over only one state right: the right to own slaves. What the Lost Cause people would have us believe is that the Confederacy’s defeat signaled the tragic downfall of a just economic system, which unjustly plunged the South into a period of chaos and rebuilding. Using images of happy dark-skinned people living in peace and harmony on beautiful, sprawling plantations, the Lost Cause Myth makes martyrs of the plantation owners who were deprived of their noble and virtuous way of life.
For perspective, let’s take a look at what the now continental United States of America looked like in 1619. Of course, there was a large Native American population. Although isolated colonies had been settled in North America between 1492 and the early 1600s–mostly Spanish and French–Jamestown, Virginia, was the first permanent British colony and the first stronghold in the region which would become the Thirteen Colonies on which our country was established.
To debunk another myth, not every group of settlers who arrived on these shores was seeking religious freedom or escape from religious persecution. Most of them, and notably Jamestown, came seeking resources (money) and power. Europeans living in densely populated countries saw this new continent as a literal gold mine of free land and all of the wealth that land would yield. Colonial powers saw it as an opportunity for expansion and greater global dominance. Of course, exercising that power and receiving the rewards of their opportunism meant disregarding the one pesky little fact that an estimated 8 million to 112 million native people already lived here in 1492. Those are obviously wildly different numbers, but bear in mind there was no census back then. Whatever the original number, however, it proved no problem for our ambitious ancestors. By 1650, the European colonists had succeeded in reducing the native population to fewer than 6 million. (Statistics from University of Wisconsin Press)
The much-celebrated Pilgrims, British colonists who came here after a brief sojourn in Holland, arrived in 1620 at Plymouth Rock and established the Plymouth Colony in what is now Massachusetts. This group was seeking religious freedom, as was the next major group who arrived in 1630: the Puritans, who settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Puritans, in many ways the strongest English settlement, distinguished themselves for both their theocratic government and their financial success. Although the Puritan work ethic, which became so much a part of our culture, was motivated by service to God, it resulted in great accumulation of wealth for some of those hard workers. It’s worth noting that it took this group only six years to found our nation’s first major university, Harvard, which has been in continuous operation from 1636 until today.
But back to the point: the Africans were here before either of the groups which settled New England; yet while the Pilgrims and Puritans are annually celebrated as the groups to whom we owe our heritage, the Africans continue to be marginalized and suppressed a whole four centuries after their arrival. Those who built the flourishing cotton, tobacco, and sugar trades owed their success to the large masses of cheap labor, but those laborers and their descendants were never granted the respect or monetary reward commensurate with their contributions. And although those dark-skinned laborers have fought in every armed conflict in which this country has engaged, they have not been granted the same recognition, honor, and appreciation as their white comrades in arms.
In 1963, 344 years into our national disgrace, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote this about our failure to extend the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to a large population whose roots in this country go deeper than the roots of many who do enjoy those rights:
We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.
(Letter from a Birmingham Jail 4/16/1963)
What a powerful statement and what a damning indictment against a country which celebrates itself as a “land of opportunity”!
The questions this statement bring to mind are reminiscent of the questions swirling around our current gun-law debates. Why are we so slow to take needed and reasonable action? Why have other countries solved the problem while we still wallow in the mud of indecision? And above all, what the hell is wrong with us that as citizens of the most powerful country on the globe we can’t resolve problems which other countries put to rest years ago?
As we mark the 400th anniversary of the first African footsteps onto our country’s shores, here’s all we need to know.
Unless you’re descended from one of the original Jamestown families, those African-Americans you see every day can trace their roots in this country further back than you can. Let that sink in. Even if you are a Jamestown descendant, those native people now living on reservations can trace their roots back hundreds or thousands of years further than you can. Bottom line, white people, is that we’re the newcomers. Wielding power over everyone who’s not like us is not our birthright.
The ridiculous fear that we are losing control of “our” nation to intruders is based on logic both convoluted and destructive. White Europeans became the majority population in this country and gained political and social dominance by decimating the native red populations and by building an empire on the backs of enslaved black people whose ancestors were brought here in chains. Your white ancestors, who you might like to believe built this country all by themselves and are therefore alone worthy of our eternal gratitude, might not have survived the first few winters and certainly would not have built the economy that put us on the map without the support from people of color. Nazi Germany was built on the premise that there is a master race and that non-members of that race should be excluded from existence. Have we learned nothing?
Our history as a people is three steps forward, two steps back. We’re in a stepping-back period right now, so it’s the responsibility of the adults in the room to start the forward movement again. We the adults in the room have to speak out against racism wherever we see it; silence is complicity. We have to vote out leaders who promote anything less than equal justice for all, and then we need to make sure we never again vote for anyone who would impede and reverse our forward progress. We have to devote our time, energy, and resources to supporting, in whatever ways we can, organizations that advocate for social justice–both within our borders and beyond.
As a young man (ages 19 and 22), Abraham Lincoln made two flatboat trips along the Mississippi River from his home in Indiana to the mouth of the river in New Orleans, Louisiana. Historians tell us those two trips made an indelible impression on young Lincoln’s mind as he experienced first-hand the horrors of slavery, including a visit to a market where human beings were buying and selling other human beings. Though few specifics of those voyages have been recorded, historians generally agree that their effects may have shaped the thinking which led to the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment.
Further study of President Lincoln makes clear that his attitudes toward race, though progressive for his time, were far from the best thinking of Americans a century-and-a-half later. Lincoln was, like all of us, a product of his time. He led important strides toward racial justice in America, but he didn’t solve the whole problem.
It would serve us well to remember that we’re probably not going to solve massive social injustices all by ourselves either, but that can’t stop us from running like hell to get the ball a little closer to the goal post. We may not live to see some future generation score the touchdown, but we can rest in peace knowing we did our part and we left the ball closer to the goal than we found it.
And let us never forget these words of President Lincoln, which I have quoted often and will continue to quote:
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Those “better angels” will lead us each day to do whatever small or large thing we can do to keep us moving forward. One thing I’ve done for a while now is just in my daily interactions to be conscious of making eye contact with everyone I meet, especially those who don’t look like me. I give them a genuine smile and a greeting and hope it assures them that their presence is not repugnant or regrettable but welcome and beautiful.
It’s a little thing. I don’t sit in congress. I’m not president. I don’t write laws. But I can smile. And I can say “hello” or “what a beautiful child” or “I love your earrings!” I can bring a moment of light into another human being’s world in which moments of light, warmth, and acceptance may be rare.
I can also write my representatives in government, participate in elections, go to demonstrations, travel to Palestine, and generally raise hell wherever my voice may be heard; and I will not neglect to do those things. But I also won’t neglect to give a smile and a kind word. All we really need is love, right?