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A new book takes a communal look at a history that has long been buried. Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 collects the work of 90 writers historians, poets, journalists, novelists and activists to tell the stories of Black Americans, from the arrival of the White Lion, which brought enslaved people to the colonies in 1619, to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones writes a chapter on the arrival of the White Lion, a harrowing tale which she calls “classically American.”
“The Adams and Eves of Black America did not arrive here in search of freedom or better life. They had been captured and stolen, forced onto a ship, shackled, writhing in filth as they suffered and starved,” she writes. “Some 40% of Angolans who boarded that ghastly vessel did not make it across the middle passage. They embarked not as people but as property.”
Image: Mashable composite; Getty Images / mikroman6
2021-02-17 11:00:00 UTC
We look to history to help us understand who we are today. Yet history is also an imperfect, often inadequate record of events. Depending on who is depicting the past, certain truths go untold. That is indeed the lesson of 1619, a year that few people understood as significant in American and African-American history until nearly two years ago.
When the
New York Times published the 1619 Project in August 2019, it marked the 400th anniversary since the first Africans arrived in a mainland English colony. Historians believe this group of captives arrived in Virginia as slaves aboard English privateer ships.Â
Indigenous Acknowledgment
Virginia Humanities acknowledges the Monacan Nation, the original people of the land and waters of our home in Charlottesville, Virginia.
We invite you to learn more about Indians in Virginia in our
Encyclopedia Virginia.
SUMMARY
The Zúñiga chart, a manuscript map of the Chesapeake Bay and Tidewater Virginia, is a copy of a map that was probably originally drawn by Captain John Smith, one of the Jamestown colonists. Named for Don Pedro de Zúñiga, a Spanish ambassador to England, who sent it to King Philip III of Spain in September 1608, the chart is significant for its insight into the locations of Indian villages, the location of Jamestown and the architecture of James Fort, and the concerns and priorities of the English colonists.
Smith arrived in Virginia on April 26, 1607, with the group of colonists who established and settled Jamestown. By 1608, Smith had already mounted multiple expeditions of the Chesapeake Bay area and spent several weeks as a captive at Werowocomoco, the residence of Powhatan, the paramount chief of the Indians of Tsenacomoco. Drawing on his travels, Smith drafted a map of the Chesapeake Bay and Tidewater Virginia and sent it to London in June 1608. It is generally bel