What we now call “America” (a name that is about 500 years old) is a collection of tribes, nations, and countries—with founders — the indigenous peoples who arrived here tens of thousands of years ago, the imperial Europeans who attacked and invaded these lands, and the Africans whom the Europeans stole and brought here as property, chattel, to supply and supplement the labor for the Europeans to exploit the vast resources of these lands.
America’s founding peoples, whom European-Americans would come to call “the Red, the White, and the Black,” are the founders of the Americas and the founders of the United States of America.
That sanctioned enslavement existed in the United States over a longer period than there has been emancipation. If you mark 1619 in Jamestown in Virginia as the starting point of enslavement by the British in the Americas, then legal slavery lasted in this country until 1865 and the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution — that’s 161 years come November of this year. So Africans have been enslaved here longer than they have been freeish. That date will arrive in 2187. (To be accurate when referencing the United States of America we have to begin the timeline with those Spanish colonies which eventually became states—the first Africans were brought to Florida in 1513).
Institutional enslavement of Africans, slavery sanctioned by state and church, arrived on European ships and flourished for more than three centuries, from 1513 to 1865 (352 years), and it will not be until 2272 that United States national emancipation, which began in 1865 will equal that length of time. What does it mean when measured chronologically to be not even halfway into freedom and full citizenship for Black people? This whole history — past, present and future — of the continued legacy of racism and the constant effort required to recognize and push against these vestiges of slavery and reverse the attitudes and habits that maintain this level of injustice and inhumanity is what we must commemorate in Black History Month. This month each of us will have to raise our personal awareness of this history and its ramifications for eleven other months of the year.
Over the past several years, I have been so moved by Indigenous people acknowledging and asking us all to acknowledge the first peoples on whatever lands we are on. It is a simple, profound, gracious telling and reminder of the truth.
Wherever we are in the Americas we are on the land of Indigenous people. People who were here thousands of years before the invasions of Europeans. We who are in Roxbury are on the shores of the land of the Massachusett people, who used the rich waters for fishing and the rich rocky resources of the mainland for toolmaking. Places the English invaders would come to call Roxbury and the Brookline Marshes.
These acknowledgments have brought me to consider and to ask you to consider another acknowledgement, an acknowledgment of a time: the date and year when the first Africans were brought to the place, wherever that place may be, where we are now.
For us, the acknowledgment may go something like this:
We stand on the land originally occupied by the Massachusetts and visited by the Nipmuck and the Wampanoag and the Pawtucket. And to which the first Africans were brought, enslaved, in 1638.
The first record of a group of African people arriving in Massachusetts is from John Winthrop’s journal. In his July 1637 notation, Winthrop wrote, “We had now slain and taken, in all, about seven hundred [Indians]. We sent fifteen of the boys and two women to Bermuda, by Mr. Pierce; but he, missing it, carried them to Providence Isle.” William Pierce was the captain of the Desire which was built in Marblehead and sailed out of Salem.
Providence Isle was a Puritan settlement off the coast of Central America.
In an entry dated February 26, 1638, Winthrop wrote in his journal: “Mr. Pierce, in the Salem ship, the Desire, returned from the West Indies after seven months. He had been, at Providence, and brought some cotton, and tobacco, and negroes, etc., from thence, and salt from Tertugos. Dry fish and strong liquors are the only commodities for those parts. He met there two men-of-war, set forth by the lords, etc., of Providence with letters of mark, who had taken divers prizes from the Spaniard, and many negroes.”
In 1637, Puritans in the Caribbean had already begun to engage in the slave trade—probably purchasing them from Spaniard slavers.
We know the name of the ship, the name of the captain, the name of the recorder of the events, but today, after 384 years, we have not one of the names recorded of the 17 Indigenous people “sent.” Nor of the enslaved Africans “brought.”
We know the names of the slavers and slave traders. We need to add the names of the enslaved. Add this to the work of Black History Month.
Byron Rushing is a former House member representing the Ninth Suffolk district in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.
