Somber but festive Va. event marks start of slavery in America in 1619
Commemoration examines brutality, perseverance
HAMPTON, Va. — They faced the sunrise to the rhythm of drums and waves on a windswept beach, dozens wearing white, near the spot where the first enslaved Africans arrived at the English colony of Virginia in 1619. On Saturday morning, they would release those spirits.
The cleansing and naming ritual, presided over by visiting chiefs from Cameroon, kicked off a weekend of events marking the 400th anniversary of the Africans’ arrival and the dawn of American slavery.
“The water was warm and salty,” said Tiffini Mason Johnson, who lives in Cockeysville, Maryland, emerging after a ceremony with women from an African cultural group. “They told me to just release myself, that I am released of anger and fear, and my grandmothers through me.”
The question of release hung over a day that walked a fine line: commemorating the nation’s fundamental sin of slavery but also celebrating the African descendants who survived its brutality and helped build America.
“Our perseverance, making it through 400 years, is something that should be honored,” said Terry Brown, who is both African-American and the National Park Service superintendent for Fort Monroe, the site of the first landing.
He started the day a few miles up the beach at Buckroe, watching the African ritual, standing out in his green uniform. He took off his hat, bobbed his head to the drums. “It’s honorable, it’s reflective and just connects me back to 400 years. I’m on a journey right now,” he said.
In 1619, an English pirate ship, the White Lion, arrived at Point Comfort, near Hampton, Virginia. It was carrying what colonist John Rolfe described as “20 and odd Negroes.” The captain of the White Lion traded the enslaved people for food, bringing slavery to Jamestown and what would become Virginia.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said he struggled to find the words to describe the themes of a day — and a country — embodying the roots of both freedom and slavery. The “dualism [of] high-minded principle and indescribable cruelty has defined us,” he said to hundreds of people gathered under a shelter on the shores of Hampton Roads at Fort Monroe.
“The transatlantic slave trade was one of the most cruel atrocities,” Kaine said, growing emotional. “And yet how fortunate we are as a country that the descendants of that cruel institution are part of our country.”
It was a day when Hampton Mayor Donnie Tuck, who is African-American, could draw hoots of pride by crowing that the first documented Africans arrived “in Hampton, not Jamestown!” But in the next breath, he noted the “indignities, dehumanization and atrocities” of the Middle Passage, which he said his own ancestors survived.
Perhaps no single person embodied those contradictions better than Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, who delivered the keynote speech despite being under the cloud of a racism scandal from earlier this year, when a photo surfaced from his 1984 medical school yearbook page showing one person in blackface and another in Klan robes.
“I’ve had to confront some painful truths,” Northam said. “Among those truths was my own incomplete understanding involving race and equity.”
As he continued, the crowd began to respond. Northam has disavowed the racist photo but admitted to wearing blackface that same year. On Saturday, his voice rising as he recited a litany of societal sins — from slavery to the state’s “massive resistance” to school integration — Northam drew huge applause when he thundered: “Black history is American history.”
Events will continue through today, when the National Park Service will observe a “healing day” in honor of 1619. At 3 p.m., bells will toll at landmarks around the country. Park service deputy director Daniel Smith struggled with emotion as he noted the bells ringing from the Statue of Liberty in New York to Independence Hall in Philadelphia to the Harriet Tubman historic site on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
The day’s youngest speaker, Virginia Beach middle-schooler Brycen Dildy, exhorted the crowd to take away a positive message. “I challenge you,” the 11-year-old said in a speech that left many in tears, “to let today also be a celebration of your commitment to become a more kind and caring individual to all!”
That was the same note on which the day had begun, at sunrise, on the beach. Jacqueline Hugee, 68, who lives in Chesapeake, Virginia, waded into the waves with the women from the African group. She crossed her arms to symbolize the chains of slavery, then uncrossed them in release. She felt, she said, like she was helping her ancestors find freedom.
“It was an awesome experience, I’m so glad I came,” she said, breathless. “It’s phenomenal — for the country to recognize us as a people and how we got where we are today. We have come farther than our ancestors brought here in chains could have imagined.”