Black History Month – 1619
We honor Black History during February and the earliest date to consider is August, 1619 when 20-30 enslaved Africans landed at Point Comfort in Hampton, Virginia., aboard the English privateer ship White Lion. In Virginia, these Africans were traded in exchange for supplies. Several days later, a second ship arrived in Virginia with additional enslaved Africans. Both groups had been captured by English privateers from the Spanish slave ship San Juan Bautista. They are the first recorded Africans to arrive in England’s mainland American colonies.
The human cargo that arrived in Virginia in 1619 had come from the port city of Luanda, now the capital of present-day Angola. Back then, it was a Portuguese colony, and most of the enslaved are believed to have been captured during an ongoing war between Portugal and the kingdom of Ndongo. Between 1618 and 1620, about 50,000 enslaved people — many of whom had been prisoners of war — were exported from Angola. An estimated 350 of these captives were loaded onto a Portuguese slave ship called the São João Bautista. That ship was en route to the Spanish colony of Veracruz when two English privateer ships, the White Lion and the Treasurer, intercepted it and seized some of the Angolans on board.
This is the first known slave ship arriving in the new world however, Juan Garrido became the first documented black person to arrive in what would become the U.S. when he accompanied Juan Ponce de León in search of the Fountain of Youth in 1513, and they ended up in present-day Florida, around St. Augustine. 1619 may be the most recognized date that slavery began in what would become the USA but as far back as 1565, the Spanish brought enslaved Africans to present-day St. Augustine, Fla., the first European settlement in what’s now the continental U.S.
Hundreds of years of the scourge of slavery would follow with the labor of those slaves building the economic strength of the new country not only just in the south but the north benefited as well. 400 years and we still have not truly addressed the evil of slavery, racism and white supremacy.
