Why is 1619 important

Email Megan. This blog offers updates on the National Conference of State Legislatures' research and training, the latest on federalism and the state legislative institution, and posts about state legislators and legislative staff. Click here to read posts from our retired blog: "The Thicket".

Create Account. Current Articles Archives Search. What's So Important About Anyway? Why is such an important year for American representative democracy? Calhoun telling you slavery is a positive good. Judges such as Henry Brown telling you the South is separate but equal. Republicans such as Newt Gingrich telling you American policies are color-blind.

Black intellectuals such as John McWhorter telling you the nation is post-racial. White supremacists such as Donald Trump telling you they are going to make America great again. It is unbearably tough to be hopeful amid all this denial, while living in this so-called heaven that feels worse than hell. I feel connected to the hopelessness Angela must have felt stepping off that ship of terror into the terror of slavery.

Then again, I know hope is essential to African Americans surviving racism another years. In order to bring about change, we have to believe change is possible. Cynicism is the kryptonite of change.

I also feel connected to the hopefulness Angela must have felt when she figured out ways to resist and survive. Connected to the Angela who heard about the successful Haitian Revolution. The Angela who survived the Underground Railroad and stepped off into freedom. The Angela who felt Ida B.

Wells unflinchingly stare down the lynch mob. I feel connected to the Angela who believes that she can be anti-racist, that she can make America anti-racist.

The Angela who believes racism will die off before the African American does. The hopeful Angela fighting off the hopelessness. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. In , enslaved Africans were part of a Spanish expedition to establish an outpost on the North American coast in present-day South Carolina.

Nearly years before Jamestown, African actors enabled American colonies to survive, and they were equally able to destroy European colonial ventures. These stories highlight additional problems with exaggerating the importance of Privileging that date and the Chesapeake region effectively erases the memory of many more African peoples than it memorializes.

That Sir John Hawkins was behind four slave-trading expeditions during the s suggests the degree to which England may have been more invested in African slavery than we typically recall. Tens of thousands of English men and women had meaningful contact with African peoples throughout the Atlantic world before Jamestown. In this light, the events of were a bit more yawn-inducing than we typically allow. From the early s forward, the Portuguese , Spanish, English, French, Dutch and others fought to control the resources of the emerging transatlantic world and worked together to facilitate the dislocation of the indigenous peoples of Africa and the Americas.

As historian John Thornton has shown us, the African men and women who appeared almost as if by chance in Virginia in were there because of a chain of events involving Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands and England. Virginia was part of the story, but it was a blip on the radar screen. These concerns about making too much of are likely familiar to some readers.

But they may not even be the biggest problem with overemphasizing this one very specific moment in time. The White Lion — which flew under the flag of a Dutch port known for its pirates — came to Virginia first in late August , followed four days later by the Treasurer. Historians do not know much about the men and women who were sold to Yeardley and Piersey, or what happened to them, though some of their names have been revealed.

For example, as historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. Nor is it the case that those who arrived in were the first enslaved people in what would become the United States.

In , for example, the Spanish brought enslaved Africans to present-day St. Augustine, Fla. In , a Spanish expedition to present-day South Carolina was thwarted when the enslaved Africans aboard resisted.

After the marriage between Pocahontas and John Rolfe, there was peace between the English and the Powhatan people, but relations started to deteriorate after her death. Those tensions would come to a head in a uprising , and later, the English sold their American Indian captives as slaves to the British colonies in the West Indies to pay for their wars with Indigenous people on the East Coast, according to Spivey. The th anniversary being marked this month is really the th anniversary of the Anglo-centric history of Africans in the U.