The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

This ship, which landed in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, carried the first enslaved African people to the English colonists of America. They were sold in exchange for supplies, marking the first such transaction in North America and the start of American chattel slavery.

During the capture, transport, and delivery of African people through the Middle Passage, enslavers sought to “precondition” enslaved people for the work they would be doing on plantations. As a result, these people started to form a new identity, “a dysphoric Blackness forged out of their collective fate, as they found strength in one another” (79).

The idea that free Black people should return to Africa emerged in the early 18th century. It was attractive to racist abolitionists who disagreed with slavery but did not want free Black Americans to integrate into society to live alongside white Americans.