John’s legislative skills were put to use when he served as the first speaker of
John’s legislative skills were put to use when he served as the first speaker of Virginia’s inaugural general assembly. From July 30 to August 4, 1619, 22 burgesses, including Thomas Jefferson’s great-grandfather, assembled for the first time in Jamestown’s newly constructed wooden church.
It is hardly coincidental that this nation’s first experiment in (wealthy, white male) democracy emerged alongside the first experiment with black enslavement (and Native assimilation), that the history of African America and American democracy are both rooted in 1619. It is hardly coincidental that both 400-year anniversaries are being marked this year, that John’s freedom begot Angela’s enslavement, that John climbed his elevated whiteness onto the head of Angela’s lowered blackness.
It is not coincidental that that all happened then. That that is all happening now. That that 400 years. That that racism and anti-racism. That that America.
No one knows when Angela was born. But she was probably young. If she was 19 years old in 1619, she’d have been born in 1600, the year John translated into English and published A Geographical Historie of Africa, a book of racist ideas about Angela’s race. First written in 1526, and popular as late as the 19th century, its racist ideas apparently had to be true since they were written by an African Moor, Leo Africanus (who probably sought favor from the Italian court that had freed and converted him). “The Negroes likewise leade a beastly kinde of life, being utterly destitute of the use of reason, of dexteritie of wit, and of all artes,” Africanus wrote. “Yea they so behave themselves, as if they had continually lived in a forrest among wilde beasts.”
In his introduction, John praised Africanus for having “largely, particularly, and methodically deciphered” the African countries better than “any writer.” His mentor, Richard Hakluyt, praised the book as the very “best, the most particular, and methodicall” that ever “was written” on Africa. John probably carried a copy of his book with him to Virginia in 1619. He had “some good book always in store,” he wrote a friend that year, not long after he may have met Angela.
Angela was no wild beast, but she was enslaved like one. She was among the 350 Angolans herded onto an overcrowded slave ship at the port of Luanda sometime in 1619. The San Juan Bautista sailed from what is now Angola for Vera Cruz, Mexico. On the middle passage, it was attacked by death—120 Africans died—and then two pirate ships, the White Lion and the Treasurer. The pirates kidnapped from the kidnappers about 60 Angolans, probably among the healthiest and youngest of the enslaved people aboard, including Angela. They divided the human bounty between the two ships and headed north. It’s a central question in African American history we are still asking.
Four hundred years ago today, on August 20, 1619, the White Lion arrived at Point Comfort, near current-day Hampton. The captain “brought not any thing but