At end of August in the year 1619, an English privateer ship call the White Lion reached Point Comfort on the Virginia peninsula. There, Governor George Yeardley and his head of trade bought 20 captives from Africa and remanded them into slavery. The history of Black people had already begun in New World, but this event marks the beginning of the trans-Atlantic slave trade conducted by subjects of the British Crown. It is these original colonists, including many Black Americans, who would fight a Revolutionary War more than a century and a half later and form the United States of America. Renamed in later years as Fort Monroe this was also the site of the Contraband Decision of 1861 during the Civil War at which three escaped slaves turned themselves over to the Union Army and began a legal argument that would result in the emancipation proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. One hundred and forty nine years after that, Fort Monroe would become the first National Monument designed by the first Black U.S. President Barack Obama in 2012.
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The Unhidden Minute is part of the Unhidden Podcast Project supported through a National Geographic Explorer Grant from the National Geographic Society, with the cooperation of the National Park Service. This series celebrates the untold stories of Black American history.
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Fort Monroe 1619