Racist power constructed the Black race—and all the Black groups. Them. Racist power kept constructing Black America over four hundred years. Them constructed, again and again. But the antiracist power within the souls of Black folk reconstructed Black America all the while, in the same way we are reconstructing ourselves in this book. We reconstructed, again and again. Them into we, defending the Black American community to defend all the individuals in the community. Them became we to allow I to become me.
Individuals of African descent came to know that they would not become free until Black America became free. Individuals bonded into community to overcome.
And we—the community—did manage to overcome at times. The community managed to secure moments of joy and peace amid sorrow and war. The community managed to invent and reinvent cultures and subjects and objects again and again. The community managed to free itself again and again. But someday has not yet arrived. The community is still striving to overcome four hundred years later.
There may be no better word to encapsulate Black American history than community. For better or worse, ever since the twenty Ndongo people arrived, individuals of African descent have, for the most part, been made into a community, functioned as a community, departed the community, lived through so much as a community.
I don’t know how the community has survived—and at times thrived—as much as it has been deprived for four hundred years. The history of Black America has been almost spiritual. Striving to survive the death that is racism. Living through death like spirits. Forging a soulful history. A history full of souls. A soul for each year of history.
Four Hundred Souls.
1619–1624
ARRIVAL
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Four hundred years ago, in 1620, a cargo ship lowered its anchor on the eastern shore of North America. It had spent sixty-six grueling days on the perilous Atlantic Ocean, and its 102 passengers fell into praise as they spotted land for the first time in more than two months.
These Puritans had fled England in search of religious freedom. We know all their names, names such as James Chilton, Frances Cook, and Mary Brewster. Their descendants proudly trace their lineage back to the group that established self-governance in the “New World” (that is, among the white population—Indigenous people were already governing themselves).
They arrived on the Mayflower, a vessel that has been called “one of the most important ships in American history.” Every fall, regaled by stories of the courageous Pilgrims, elementary school children whose skin is peach, tan, and chestnut fashion black captain hats from paper to dress up like the passengers on the Mayflower. Our country has wrapped a national holiday around the Pilgrims’ story, ensuring the Mayflower’s mythical place in the American narrative.
But a year before the Mayflower, in 1619, another ship dropped anchor on the eastern shore of North America. Its name was the White Lion, and it, too, would become one of the most important ships in American history. And yet there is no ship manifest inscribed with the names of its passengers and no descendants’ society. These people’s arrival was deemed so insignificant, their humanity so inconsequential, that we do not know even how many of those packed into the White Lion’s hull came ashore, just that some “20 and odd Negroes” disembarked and joined the British colonists in Virginia. But in his sweeping history Before the Mayflower, first published in 1962, scholar Lerone Bennett, Jr., said of the White Lion, “No one sensed how extraordinary she really was…[but] few ships, before or since, have unloaded a more momentous cargo.”
This “cargo,” this group of twenty to thirty Angolans, sold from the deck of the White Lion by criminal English marauders in exchange for food and supplies, was also foundational to the American story. But while every American child learns about the Mayflower, virtually no American child learns about the White Lion.
And yet the story of the White Lion is classically American. It is a harrowing tale—one filled with all the things that this country would rather not remember, a taint on a nation that believes above all else in its exceptionality.
The Adams and Eves of Black America did not arrive here in search of freedom or a better life. They had been captured and stolen, forced onto a ship, shackled, writhing in filth as they suffered and starved. Some 40 percent of the Angolans who boarded that ghastly vessel did not make it across the Middle Passage. They embarked not as people but as property, sold to white colonists who just were beginning to birth democracy for themselves, commencing a four-hundred-year struggle between the two opposing ideas foundational to America.
And so the White Lion has been relegated to what Bennett called the “back alley of American history.” There are no annual classroom commemorations of that moment in August 1619. No children dress up as its occupants or perform classroom skits. No holiday honors it. The White Lion and the people on that ship have been expunged from our collective memory. This omission is intentional: when we are creating a shared history, what we remember is just as revelatory as what we forget. If the Mayflower was the advent of American freedom, then the White Lion was the advent of American slavery. And so while arriving just a year apart, one ship and its people have been immortalized, the other completely erased.
W.E.B. Du Bois called such erasure the propaganda of history. “It is propaganda like this that has led men in the past to insist that history is ‘lies agreed upon’; and to point out the danger in such misinformation,” he wrote in his influential treatise Black Reconstruction (1935). Du Bois argued that America had falsified the fact of its history “because the nation was ashamed.” But he warned, “It is indeed extremely doubtful if any permanent benefit comes to the world through such action.”
Because what is clear is that while we can erase the memory of the White Lion, we cannot erase its impact. Together these two ships, the White Lion and the Mayflower, bridging the three continents that made America, would constitute this nation’s most quintessential and perplexing elements, underpinning the grave contradictions that we have failed to overcome.
These elemental contradictions led founder Thomas Jefferson, some 150 years later, to draft the majestic words declaring the inalienable and universal rights of men for a new country that would hold one-fifth of its population—the literal and figurative descendants of the White Lion—in absolute bondage. They would lead Frederick Douglass—one of the founders of American democracy—to issue in 1852 these fiery words commemorating an American Revolution that liberated white people while ensuring another century of subjugation for Black people:
This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom.
What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view. Standing there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, f
alse to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.
The contradictions between these two founding arrivals—the Mayflower and the White Lion—would lead to the deadliest war in American history, fought over how much of our nation would be enslaved and how much would be free. They would lead us to spend a century seeking to expand democracy abroad, beckoning other lands to “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” while violently suppressing democracy at home for the descendants of those involuntary immigrants who arrived on ships like the White Lion. They would lead to the elections—back-to-back—of the first Black president and then of a white nationalist one.
The erasure of August 1619 has served as part of a centuries-long effort to hide the crime. But it has also, as Du Bois explained in The Souls of Black Folk, robbed Black Americans of our lineage.
Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here….Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation,—we fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy, and Truth, lest the nation be smitten with a curse. Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood. Are not these gifts worth the giving? Is not this work and striving?
Would America have been America without her Negro people?
We cannot fathom it. Black Americans, by definition, are an amalgamated people. Our bodies form the genetic code—we are African, Native, and European—that made America and Americans. We are the living manifestation of the physical, cultural, and ideological merger of the peoples who landed on those ships but a year apart, and of those people who were already here at arrival. Despite the way we have been taught these histories, these stories do not march side by side or in parallel but are inherently intertwined, inseparable. The time for subordinating one of these histories to another has long passed. We must remember the White Lion along with the Mayflower, and the Powhatan along with the English at Jamestown. As Du Bois implores, “Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?”
The true story of America begins here, in 1619. This is our story. We must not flinch.
1624–1629
AFRICA
Molefi Kete Asante
No one knows the precise date of the arrival of Africans in North America. Africans could have arrived centuries before the historical record indicates. We know they arrived in what is now South Carolina with Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón in 1526. In 1565 a marriage was recorded between Luisa de Abrego, a free African woman, and Miguel Rodríguez, a Segovian conquistador, in Spanish Florida. This is the first known Christian marriage in what is now the continental United States. Those Africans in Spanish Florida eventually fought against the colonists and found refuge among Native Americans. The ones who did not escape into the forest eventually made their way to Haiti.
By the time the first British North American colony was established in 1607, Africans had already been in the Caribbean region for over one hundred years. Africans entered the Jamestown colony at Point Comfort in Virginia in 1619. By 1624, a tapestry of ethnic convergence in North America was already being woven. Yoruba, Wolof, and Mandinka people had already been taken from their coasts and brought to the Americas. It is this mixture of cultures that constitutes the quintessential African presence in the British North American colony.
Throughout these years, Africans back on the continent fought off the threat of political dismemberment as the European powers, including the English, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and French, attacked the continent’s people and resources in a constant barrage of murder, theft, and brutality. In 1626, on the eastern side of Africa, Emperor Susenyos I of Ethiopia agreed to allow Patriarch Afonso Mendes the primacy of the Roman See over the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The Roman See quickly renamed the Ethiopian Church the Catholic Church of Ethiopia; this arrangement would not be permanent because the Ethiopians would later advance their autonomy.
In other developments taking place in Africa, Muchino a Muhatu Nzingha of the kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba of the Mbundu people met with the Portuguese governor in 1622. By 1624, war was on the horizon. João Correia de Sousa, the Portuguese governor, offered Nzingha a floor mat, instead of a chair, to sit on during the negotiations—an act that in Mbundu custom was appropriate only for subordinates. Unwilling to accept this degradation, Nzingha ordered one of her servants to get down on the ground, and she sat on their back during negotiations. She agreed to become a Catholic in 1622, but by 1626 she knew she had made a mistake in her fight against Portuguese slave traders. Whatever negative traits the Portuguese saw in Africans, the English Puritans came to Massachusetts in the late 1620s with an attitude just as horrible. They believed that Africans were similar to the devil and practiced an evil and superstitious religion.
Back in West Africa, the remnants of the Ghana, Mali, and Songhay kingdoms were losing their people to the encroaching European merchants who kidnapped Africans in what became the largest movement of one population by another in world history. Mandinka, Peul, Wolof, Yoruba, Hausa, and other ethnic groups would be uprooted on one side of the ocean and planted on the other.
Since no African slaves were brought to the Americas, but only Africans who were enslaved, it is safe to assume that among the arrivals in the 1620s were the usual human variety of personalities with an equally impressive number of character traits. Out of the cauldron that was developing under the hegemony of Europeans emerged several recognized types: the recorder of events, the interpreter of events, the creator of events, the advancer of events, the maintainer of events, and the memorializer of events.
Each of these archetypes was rooted in African cultures and stretched back in time long before 1624. The recorder (whom the Wolof and Mandinka referred to as the djeli and whom the Serer, Asante, Yoruba, and Bakongo called by other names) functioned as the one who listened to everything, saw everything, and remembered the secrets of all, so that he or she could later recall patterns of the past. The interpreter was a seer, whose purpose was to make sense out of the familiar and the unfamiliar, so that the African population would be sustained by the integration of African motifs, icons, and values into the rifts of the new place. The creator of events emerged in the 1620s as the African person who farmed, cleared the forests, and confronted the difficulties of living in a world made by Europeans, whose assaults on African dignity and Native Americans’ inheritance were constant. The advancer of events was the person who sought to adjust African cultures and values to the newly forming American society. To advance events is to expose the nature of American activities in the early frontiers of the colonies and to encourage a form of governance that would secure the rights of Africans. The maintainer of events exhibited a clear conception of the society in order to service the polity with integrity, harmony, and preparedness for any eventuality. The memorializer of events assumed a spiritual role in the community, suggesting to other Africans in the colonies the need for African people to take account of and remember the events that created community. Many times these individuals would bring out the spiritual characteristics inherited from their African origins.
All these roles were played by women and men in the early period of African socialization in the Americas; they would become the archetypes through which the African community would tell its own story, establishing its heroic nature and distinguishing its epochal struggle for liberation from that of other peoples over the generations.
1629–1634
WHIPPED FOR LYING WITH A BLACK WOMAN
Ijeoma Oluo
My mother is white, and I am Black. She is my biologic
al mother. Half of my genetic makeup came from her. My skin is not the rich deep brown of my father’s, having been lightened to a deep tan by my mother. I have my mother’s eyes, my mother’s face—and yet she will always be white, and I will always be Black. When people want to know why my skin is the color it is, or why my features are racially vague, I will say, “I am half Nigerian,” or “I am mixed-race Black,” or “my mother is white.” But I am not white—I’m not even half-white. My mother is white. I am Black.
My mother is white and I am Black because in 1630 a Virginia colonial court ordered the whipping of Hugh Davis, a white man, as a punishment for sleeping with a Black woman. He was whipped in front of an assembled audience of Black and white Virginians, to show everyone what the punishment would be for “abusing himself to the dishonor of God and shame of Christians, by defiling his body in lying with a negro.”
Prior to the whipping of Hugh Davis, anti-Black racism already existed in the colonies. At the time, when there were scarcely one hundred Africans in Virginia, anti-Black racist ideas operated mostly in religious terms—whites referred to themselves as Christians and Africans as heathens.
Anti-Black racism did not arrive on the shores of the New World fully formed. Step by step, anti-Blackness and slavery justified, strengthened, and expanded each other, building a vast network of systemic inequity that dictates large amounts of Black and white American life to this day.
But in 1630 the whipping of Hugh Davis wrote one important concept of race in America into law: the exclusivity of whiteness.
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