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, false 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.