1619: Past and Present

With Good Reason

400 years ago, in 1619, the first Africans arrived in English-speaking North America. Cassandra Newby-Alexander (Norfolk State University) explores how we should commemorate that history and what’s at stake when we ignore it. Richard Chew (Virginia State University) explains how a British king’s fear of being beheaded impacted the expansion of slavery in the US colonies. Plantations in America’s South are physical testaments to the great wealth accrued through slave labor. Stephen Hanna (University of Mary Washington) says plantation museums often gloss over that economic history in favor of more romanticized depictions of plantation life. There’s little historical evidence that African Americans supported the Confederate cause by becoming soldiers. Yet this myth of the “black Confederate” remains in circulation. Gabriel Reich (Virginia Commonwealth University) studies the way collective memories of the Civil War are shaped and offers ways school curricula could address these problematic narratives.