How you doing? Excuse me while I partake of this cancer stick. That’s your Happy Valentine’s Day, Nikole. This is “1619.” archived recording (speaker 1) įrom The New York Times Magazine, I’m Nikole Hannah-Jones. And what they traded were 20 to 30 Africans, and this would be at this place kind of ironically called Point Comfort, where slavery in the British North American colonies that would go on to become the United States begins. A pirate ship by the name of White Lion sails into the bay here, and they needed to trade something of value so that they could get supplies to make the rest of their journey. They had been made black by those who believed themselves to be white.Īnd where they were headed, black equaled ‘slave.’ So these were their people now. Others refused to eat, mouths clamped shut until their hearts gave out.īut in the suffocating hull of a ship called the White Lion, bound for where they did not know, those who refused to die understood that the men and women chained next to them in the dark were no longer strangers. They heaved themselves over the walls of wooden ships to swim one last time with their ancestors. The teal eternity of the Atlantic Ocean had severed them so completely that it was as if nothing had ever existed before, that everything they ever knew had simply vanished from the earth. They knew then that they would not hug their grandmothers again, or share a laugh with a cousin during his nuptials, or sing their baby softly to sleep with the same lullabies that their mothers had once sung to them. It was after the fear had turned to despair and the despair to resignation and the resignation gave way, finally, to resolve. Perhaps it was in the second week, or the third, but surely by the fourth, when they had not seen their land or any land for so many days that they lost count. When it occurred, no one can say for certain. They say our people were born on the water.
I just wonder a lot what it was, what it was like. I don’t know, thinking about what they went through. What is going through your head right now? nikole hannah-jones What does it smell like? nikole hannah-jones It’s actually kind of a great day for fishing, which is why it stinks. In 1619, when enslaved Africans first arrived in what would become the United States, black people began the fight to make that ideal a reality. The Fight for a True Democracy In 1776, the nation was founded on the ideal of democracy.
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