First Africans in Virginia

Did You Know?

• The 1940 American Negro Exposition included a historical diorama of the 1619 arrival, later restored and held at the Legacy Museum of Tuskegee University.
• Sidney E. King painted a historical scene of the 1619 arrival for the National Park Service in the 1950s.
• Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller created a diorama of the 1619 arrival for the 1907 Jamestown Exposition, the first such commission granted to an African-American woman artist by the U.S. government.

Transit from Port of Luanda to Veracruz

Portuguese slave traders, with African allies such as the Imbangala, captured thousands of people from the Kingdom of Ndongo during invasions under Governor Luís Mendes de Vasconcellos. In 1619, the Portuguese fluyt San Juan Bautista carried about 350 captives from the Port of Luanda in Angola to the bay of Veracruz in Mexico. Of these, roughly 143 died during the Middle Passage, and 24 children were sold during a stop at the Colony of Santiago in Jamaica. Ultimately, 123 enslaved people reached Veracruz, while a smaller group of 20–30 (or perhaps double that) was taken by privateers.

Attack by English privateers

Near Veracruz in the Bay of Campeche, the English privateers White Lion and Treasurer, operating under Dutch and Savoyard letters of marque and sponsored by the Earl of Warwick and Samuel Argall, attacked the San Juan Bautista. Each vessel took 20–30 of the African captives to Old Point Comfort on Hampton Roads, the first such group brought to mainland English America. Most of those aboard the Treasurer were taken shortly thereafter to Nathaniel Butler in Bermuda. One enslaved woman from the Treasurer, named Angela, was purchased by Captain William Peirce and is the earliest historically attested enslaved African in the colony.

Colony of Virginia

The first Africans were initially owned by colonists including George Yeardley, William Tucker, Abraham Piersey, Francis West, and Edward Bennett. A 1620 census recorded thirty-two Africans in the colony. Anthony Longo, whose surname may originate from the Kingdom of Loango or the name Congo, entered the ownership of Abraham Piersey in 1619. By 1635 he was free, and in 1653 he married an Englishwoman named Hannah; they had three children and acquired headrights for 250 acres of land, though Longo assigned it to a white planter in 1658 and worked as a tenant farmer. After the fall of tobacco prices and his wife's death in 1669, Longo applied for relief, and his children were hired out as indentured servants. He died in 1670. His son John later became a farmer, carpenter, and raised livestock; his common-law marriage to an Englishwoman was challenged by the court. The free African-American Longo family declined after John's death as racial consciousness increased. The Blizzards, enslaved by Captain William Ewens, were married before 1639 and had five children; their descendants live in present-day Surry County, Virginia.

Commemoration

Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address in 1865 referred to 'the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil,' which scholar Diana Schaub interprets as an allusion to 1619. George Washington Williams recognized the arrival as the starting point for African American history in his 1882 book. The 350th anniversary in 1969 was marked by a Virginia effort organized by Oliver Hill, though opposed by some including then-freshman state senator Douglas Wilder. The 400th anniversary in 2019 was commemorated by the congressionally-chartered '400 Years of African-American History Commission' under the National Park Service, alongside The 1619 Project and the Year of Return in Ghana.