Tourists getting a look at roots of U.S. slavery

Monument planned for ship’s landing site in Va.

JAMESTOWN, Va. — On a recent afternoon, tour guide Justin Bates pointed to the spot where historic Jamestown’s legislature first convened in July 1619. He then gestured toward a nearby spot where some of the first slaves in English North America arrived a few weeks later.

“Freedom over there,” Bates told visitors near the banks of Virginia’s James River. “Slavery over here.”

Jamestown has long been associated with the legend of Pocahontas and more recently as a place where a harsh winter turned some colonists into cannibals. But the historic site is now offering a regular tour that encourages visitors to consider the beginnings of American slavery.

The First Africans tour is the first of its kind at Historic Jamestowne, a heritage site at the location of the 1607 James Fort. But it’s part of a much larger reckoning over slavery.

In 1619, the Africans came on two ships that had raided what is believed to have been a Spanish slave vessel in the Gulf of Mexico. Sailing into the Chesapeake Bay to what is now Hampton, Virginia, the ships traded more than 30 Africans for food and supplies.

English colonists took the Africans, who came from what is now Angola, to properties along the James River.

A visitors’ center and monument are planned for the landing site in Hampton. Known then as Point Comfort, the area is now part of Fort Monroe, a former U.S. military base owned by the National Park Service.

“It’s a difficult story,” said Terry E. Brown, the first black superintendent of the Fort Monroe National Monument. “But I want the nation to understand this is an American story.”

Recognition of the enslaved Africans’ arrival also provides a counter-narrative to the claims of white nationalists that America’s roots are white.

“It was not a white society with people of color as interlopers, playing bit parts,” said James Horn, president of the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation, which oversees archaeological digs there.

One ongoing excavation focuses on an African woman taken to Jamestown in 1619. She had been given the name Angela and lived in the house of Captain William Pierce, a wealthy merchant and planter.

The structure no longer exists. But archeologists with the National Park Service and Jamestown Rediscovery have uncovered its brick floor and located the kitchen area where Angela likely worked.

The First Africans tour includes the excavation site as well as a spot on the river where Angela likely first stepped off a boat into Jamestown.

“Think about what that must have felt like,” Bates recently told a group of visitors.

“Scary,” a woman said.

Kym Hall, the National Park Service’s superintendent of Colonial National Historical Park, which includes Jamestown, said tears have been shed at the site. Some of those tears were her own.

“We hope to bring some empathy and connection and understanding about these stories of origin,” she said.