by Mildred Europa Taylor, Face2faceAfrica.com
Community members in Hampton, Virginia, were joined by state leaders to dedicate the African Landing Memorial Plaza, a new Virginia memorial that pays homage to the first documented enslaved Africans who arrived in Virginia more than 400 years ago.
The dedication ceremony comes years after residents and organizations, including the 1619 Project and The William Tucker 1624 Society, began campaigning to ensure African-American history at the site would not be forgotten but told accurately, 13NewsNow reported.
More than 400 years ago, in 1619, a British ship landed on the shores of Virginia in what was then a British colony.
John Rolfe, the plantation owner and official overseeing the colony, noted that the English ship, White Lion, “brought not anything but 20 and odd Negroes”.
Having arrived at Point Comfort on the James River on August 20, 1619, this would mark the beginning of slavery in the American colonies. That fateful day would set in motion what would become about 246 years of chattel slavery in the United States that analysts say haunts the country to this day.
Becoming the first documented enslaved Africans to have arrived in the British Colony of Virginia, some of the 20 African captives, right after landing on the shores of the colony, were sold in exchange for food and provisions, while the rest were transported to Jamestown and sold into slavery.
Historical accounts had previously believed that these first Africans came from the Caribbean, but later details showed that they came from the kingdom of Ndongo, in present-day Angola.
According to the Hampton History Museum, they were captured there by Portuguese colonists and sent to the port of Luanda on board the slave ship São João Baptista.
Today, their story is being retold and formally recognized through a permanent memorial designed to honor those who endured the harrowing experiences on the ship before reaching their new homes. As reported by 13NewsNow, the African Landing Memorial Plaza was built on four guiding themes — truth, empathy, respect, and hope.
“It’s often said that you need story more than food to survive,” Fort Monroe Authority CEO Scott Martin said. “The descendants are with us today, the story is still with us today… and when you sit out here at sunrise or sunset, you watch the land speak to you.”
Some of the state leaders at the event over the weekend were Governor Abigail Spanberger, Attorney General Jay Jones, Congressman Bobby Scott, and Virginia Senator Mamie Locke.
Governor Spanberger said at the ceremony that the plaza is here to connect past and future generations.
“It is important to know and to celebrate that your ancestors built something here that this nation still stands on… the history, the resilience, the power,” said Spanberger.
The Fort Monroe Authority started working on the African Landing Memorial Plaza project in 2017 and went ahead to collaborate with local nonprofit Project 1619 to design it at the cost of about $9 million, using federal and state and local fiscal recovery funds.
The pedestrian-only plaza is currently open to the public, awaiting sculptures honoring those first Africans and their stories. The statues are expected to be completed and installed later this summer.
It is significant to note that although Virginia was the first British colony to legally define slavery in mid-17th century North America, a forced labour regime was already present in the rest of the Americas at the time.
According to a report by France 24, Spanish conquistadors had already, as early as 1502, brought African slaves to the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. In 1526, a Spanish expedition also brought African captives to present-day South Carolina, but the following year, the settlement was abandoned after the Africans protested.
In effect, the year 1619 is marked as the precise beginning of North American slavery. By the 1680s, African slave labor had become the dominant system on Virginia farms and the slave population continued to grow as slave labor was used to help fuel the growing tobacco and cotton industries in the southern states.