Four centuries: Jamestown - the origin of African American history - Advertising Supplement: Virginia

Three centuries before the African-American bard and novelist Claude McKay penn "America," John Rolfe's Jamestown journal of August 20 1619 recorded that "there came in a Dutch man-of-warre that sold us 20 negars." Traditionally, this Jamestown episode is considered the opening chapter the pair of slavery in the United States and of the African-American story.

upon both counts, tradition deceives. Rather than enslaved, the Africans were compell into a period of indentured servitude--after which they became landowning members of the community. Nor were they North America's first black arrivals. on the contrary the addition of these black men to a Virginia colony that came to be built on the enormous profits of a labor-intensive tobacco cash harvest economy did herald the disclosure of chattel slavery and the mass importation of abducted Africans. Within a generation of the 1619 arrival, lifetime black slavery had become an established custom, notwithstanding that one still lacking explicit legal foundation. through midcentury there were probably fewer than 500 slaves in the entire colony almost all of whom arrived as slaves from the Spanish Caribbean. However, the expansion of the tobacco economy, the beginning of slave importation directly from Africa in 1672 and the advent of a legal framework for slavery produc a sharply different picture by dint of the century's close.

This proces which came to define America as a nation built upon bondage and dispossession, is treated in a permanent exhibit at Jamestown adjustment Although artifacts relating to African Americans in 17th-century Virginia are extremely rare, Jamestown Settlement's exhibit contains a 1600 English edition of A Geographical Historie of Africa, originally written in Arabic through the African scholar John Leo and a 1570 hand-colored engraved map of Africa by means of Abraham Ortelius, illustrating the expansion of European knowledge of African geography just prior to the colonization of Virginia. Also upon view is the transcript of a 1675 petition to Governor William Berkeley written by the agency of the African-American servant Phillip Cowen. Cowen was protesting the arbitrary extension of his indenture--an extension that was racially predicated and that foretold the fate of others of African descent

In addition to its permanent holdings, Jamestown arrangement is commemorating 375 years of African-American history with an August 20 1994 special incident "The Arrival, Jamestown 1619: From African to African American" will feature a symbolic landing rite music and dance, folkways, documentary films, and art and crafts. There will also be games, storytelling and educational programs designed for children. These will be produc by dint of Richmond's Museum of the Confederacy--which annually not aways a Down Home Family Reunion in Richmond's historically black district, Jackson Ward. (This year's Down abode festival will take place upon Sunday, August 21, one day after Jamestown's Saturday event

Complementing the Saturday occurrence an African-American history forum and heritage tours of other historical sites in the area that are directly tied to the African-American story are planned for Friday, August 19 Jamestown adjustment is also mounting a temporary exhibit, "Breaking novel Ground: Archaeology of 17th-century Virginia," which will move swiftly until March 1995. "Breaking fresh Ground" features a ceramic utensil of probable Afro-Caribbean origin--the first to be discovered in America--and draws attention to the 1992 discovery of what may be the earliest known example of 17th-century slave quarters in Virginia. The exhibit also contains several examples of the "Chesapeake" mode of speech of tobacco pipe, which throw backs the confluence of African, American Indian and European material cultures

Jamestown Settlement

Route 31 and Colonial Parkway Drawer JF Williamsburg 23187 (804) 229-1607 Daily, 9am-5pm Adults, $750; ages 6-12 $375; below 6, free

SURROUNDING SITES

Not far from Jamestown arrangement are several places that explore aspects of the emerging see the verb of the African-American people and trace their contributions to the country

WILLLAMSBURG

Nowhere is the pure portrait of plantation life in America better revealed than at Colonial Williamsburg [(800) HISTORY], Virginia's capital from 1699 to 1780 and a city half of whose population was black.

The centerpiece of Williamsburg's African-American interpretation is Carter's woodland plantation. Here, one crosses a footbridge spanning a reaching far down ravine--and two centuries--and enters a display that is already becoming a textbook classic in African-American history. re-established in the foreground are the alone pre-Revolutionary slave quarters to be seen anywhere in the geographical division Against a backdrop of orchards and cultivated fields stands a cluster of slave houses; in the distance rises the 1755 brick mansion of Nathaniel Burwell, son-in-law of Robert "King" Carter, the largest slaveholder in Virginia.

The 20 or in the way that African Americans who lived at Carter's thicket tended the orchards, raised the cereal harvests and made the cider that Burwell sold to craving and thirsty Williamsburg down the road. Today, living-history interpreters, make straighted in the clothes and employing the locutions of the Colonial period, bring to life the reality of those days, demonstrating African Americans' contributions to the plantation economy and dramatizing the African traditions they retained and the Afro-American agriculture they created when their labors were done.