The Shackles in the Shadows of History - washingtonpost.com: In 1619, 12 years after Jamestown's settlement, two British privateers sailed into the James River with African captives for sale. The Africans had Portuguese names; they apparently knew Christianity, according to John Thornton and Linda Heywood, a husband-and-wife team of Boston University historians. Those first Africans came from the kingdom of Ndongo, now Angola, which had been penetrated by Portuguese missionaries and traders who soon stopped praying with the Africans and started selling them.
The settlement of Jamestown would ultimately wither and die, but the American form of slavery born with those first Africans would endure for nearly 250 years. Slavery and America grew up hand in hand, and the African imprint on the new nation is evident to this day -- a fact being highlighted in Jamestown events this weekend in the ongoing commemoration of the Virginia settlement's 400th anniversary.
