First Africans in Virginia

"Landing Negroes at Jamestown from Dutch man-of-war, 1619". This 1901 illustration's caption is incorrect, as The White Lion was an English privateer operating under a Dutch letter of marque, and landed at nearby Old Point Comfort.

The first Africans in Virginia were a group of "twenty and odd" captive persons originally from modern-day Angola who landed at Old Point Comfort in Hampton, Virginia in late August 1619. Their arrival is seen as a beginning of the history of slavery in Virginia and British colonies in North America, although they were not in chattel slavery as it would develop in the United States, but were sold as indentured servants and had mostly worked off their indentures and were free by 1630.[1] These colonies would go on to secede and become the United States in 1776. The landing of these captive Africans is also seen as a starting point for African American history, given that they were the first such group in mainland British America.[2][3]

They were sold to the governor of Virginia by "Capt Jope", the commander of the White Lion, who attacked and plundered them from the slave ship São João Baptista, which was carrying over three hundred people who had been kidnapped from the Kingdom of Ndongo and were being forcibly sailed to New Spain (modern-day Mexico).[4] Upon arrival, they were sold as indentured servants.[1] Recognition of this event has been promoted since 1994 by Calvin Pearson and "Project 1619 Inc", an organization he founded in 2007, whose work led the Virginia Department of Historic Resources to install a historic marker commemorating this event at Old Point Comfort in 2007 and the designation of this area as the Fort Monroe National Monument in 2011.[5]

Several commemorations of this event took place on its 400th anniversary in August 2019, including the starting of The 1619 Project (not associated with Project 1619, Inc.) with a publication by Nikole Hannah-Jones commemorating this event and the Year of Return, Ghana 2019 to encourage the African diaspora to settle in and invest in Africa.

  1. ^ a b Ford, Clyde W (August 29, 2019). "Servants or slaves? How Africans first came to America matters". Seattle Times. Retrieved 1 March 2024.
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference :0 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ "Africans, Virginia's First – Encyclopedia Virginia". Retrieved 2021-05-31.
  4. ^ Holland, Jesse J. (2019-02-07). "Researchers seek fuller picture of first Africans in America". Associated Press. Washington, D.C. Retrieved 2021-11-26.
  5. ^ Russ, Valerie (2019-08-22). "What you thought you knew about the beginnings of U.S. slavery may need an update". The Philadelphia Inquirer. Retrieved 2021-11-26.