Transcript for the pbs video “The Black Atlantic”

I’ve spent much of my life searching for the stories of the African American people.

Our first notation of Anthony Johnson essentially defines him as Antonio a Negro.

I have always wanted to tell their history, 5 centuries in the making. It’s a living history, and I have traveled around the country and across the globe to chronicle it.

Did any of you receive wealth inherited from the slave trade? (One African man raises his hand)

Black people changed American society.

America probably wouldn’t have much of a popular culture without black people.

We’re blackified. We took everything and made it like made it better.

You are a good cook, man.

Black people redefined the American Dream.

Robert Smalls epitomizes America. Come from nothing and to be a success.

They held the country to it’s ideals – even when it abandoned them.

In these 6 hours, I’ll tell the stories of some of the people, places and events that made black history. Stories of courage, determination, and the power of hope.

Are you prepared to take the oath Senator? I am.

The African American story begins here, on the Atlantic Ocean. Africans crossed these waters with the very first European explorers and their stories show that, right from the start the black people who came to this land nurtured aspirations and dreams…dreams that would never disappear, even in the long night of slavery. Dreams that would help them endure and overcome.

Florida, the first known African in American came here when Spanish explorers in 1513. His name was Juan Garrido. He was free and he left his mark on the new world. Garrido helped Cortez take Mexico. Then he headed for California, searching for gold.

20 years later, a black man struggled to cross this Texas desert. He was called Esteban the Moor. He was one of just 4 survivors of a Spanish expedition that went horribly wrong. Esteban served as a guide and a translator for his companions, negotiating their way to safety across this forbidding landscape. By the year 1536, they had walked 15,000 miles. They had seen more of the North American continent than any explorers would until Lewis and Clark.

Garrido and Esteban were among the first Africans in our country. They found hope and opportunity here, but things changed quickly.

1619

Jamestown, Virginia, the first British Colony in what became the United States. In 1619, this was the ultimate frontier town. Crude fortifications bordering a muddy, malarial swamp. Then, one morning in August, a ship appeared. It was carrying African slaves, part of a small group that had just landed at Fort Comfort, a few miles from here. That’s how slavery began in the English Colonies. Plantations, as we imagine them, didn’t exist, yet. This was just a fragile outpost in the wilderness.

Lives in colonial Virginia were very precarious. They were really stuck at the edge of survival.

I’ve come here, just a few miles from Jamestown, to look for traces of a man named Anthony Johnson, a man whose life shows how slavery evolved in Virginia.

Our first notation of Anthony Johnson is from the early Virginia muster roll, which essentially defines him as Antonio the Negro. So his blackness was part of his name, his title. Exactly. Despite his skin color, Johnson found opportunities in Jamestown. He worked side by side with his owner, and forged a bond, based on necessity. In order for the master to survive, he needed Anthony Johnson. To make a farm in this kind of environment, it was all about manual labor, so Anthony Johnson earned his way to his own freedom and his master actually provided him with a sort of a start up, if you will. You mean he gave him a little cash and some land? Yeah, some land it seems, yes.

Anthony Johnson soon began to prosper. He owned a 250 acre tobacco farm, he had white indentured servants, and he even had an African slave of his own. But as Johnson prospered, so did Virginia. Within decades, Jamestown had become the center of a booming tobacco economy that was desperate for labor, and this transformed slavery from a loose informal arrangement into a rigid racial system. A system in which a life like Anthony Johnson’s would be inconceivable. Johnson’s blackness, his Africaness, these things define him; mark him uh, as an outsider. The stigma of blackness…The stigma of blackness. And the status was tied to that observable trait which was one that was very difficult to surmount.

After Johnson died, a court ruled that he was “a Negro, and by consequence, an alien.” And then the colony of Virginia seized his family’s land. Johnson’s story marked a new era in the British Colonies. From this point on, slavery would be solely based on race. And the acquisition of slaves would be central to the acquisition of wealth. In effect, the British were simply trying to do what many Europeans had already done.

By the time that Anthony Johnson arrived in Jamestown in the early 1620s, more than half a million enslaved Africans had already been spread across the New World…into Brazil, Mexico, and the Caribbean. The free labor of these slaves was making fortunes for the Portuguese and the Spanish. Now, the British wanted to get in on the action.

Most of the largest cities of the Americas were dominated by Africans. There were more Africans in those cities than there were Europeans. Here I am talking about places like Mexico City, Lima, Panama City, Havana. So when Jamestown is founded, all of those colonists understood a world in which Africans were the primary labor force for producing wealth for Europe.

I think it’s important to understand that the British were not innovating when they settled Jamestown. They were trying to catch up. American historians sometimes treat the emergence of slavery as a mystery. Right, well, how do all of these Africans get here? The real mystery would have been if slavery had not developed in Virginia.

A brutal equation ruled the new world. Black equaled slave. And to fulfill their hunger for slaves, the British turned to the place that many other Europeans had turned already. Africa.

Sierra Leone was once a major hub for the slave trade. More than 300,000 people were taken from here and shipped to the New World in bondage. But the first slave traders in this place weren’t Europeans. They were other black Africans. Africans practiced slavery long before they ever saw a white person. All across this continent, slaves were part of a system based not on race, but on ethnic difference and brute power. A system involving an enormous array of monarchs, merchants, and mercenaries.

African kingdoms were at war with one another. War was a theme in Africa and actually Europe as well for many, many years and so, as a part of these wars, as a result of these wars, people were taken hostage and made into slaves.

I’ve come to Port Loco, a river town in Sierra Leone, and the longstanding home of the Temne people. For centuries, the Temne here collected captives who had been taken in wars. They tied them, packed them into small boats, and sailed them downstream where they were sold to Europeans for profit. We sometimes romanticize Africa. We think that Africa was idyllic until the white man came, but there were deep tensions between ethnic groups here. Black Africans didn’t necessarily feel the bonds of skin color any more say than white Europeans did.

Slavery was ongoing before Europeans came. It was just a common business. They come here in this waf(?) Here is the landing path for the boats. Who were the slave traders? The slave traders were great warriors, strong men, chiefs. They do this business.

A lot of misery loaded onto these boats. Yes but our people we are not thinking about this misery. It was a lucrative business.

I was surprised to find out, that in Port Loco today, there are still many families whose ancestors profited from the trade, and some of them were willing to tell me about it.

Speak from your heart. Did any of you receive wealth, inherited from the slave trade? (One man raised his hand). Yes, my people were involved. We had 500 slaves. 500! My God, so he was very rich! Yes, our people were rich. They were taking slaves from everywhere, often by war. Sometimes, they would just grab children and sell them.

Would chiefs wage war just to get slaves? Oh, yes! They were given guns, money, hard liquor and fine clothing. All in exchange for slaves.

In America, we think black men were selling black people to the white man, but when you see it, do you see it as Temne were buying Loco. Mende were buying Temne, etc. Is there a difference? Well…

Were all back people black? Yes only black people are black. We don’t speak the same language. I don’t like what you like. You know, we just don’t live in harmony.

Though some find it difficult to face, the crucial roles of Africans in the slave trade is now well documented. Historians estimate that the overwhelming majority of slaves shipped to the new world were capture and sold by African Kingdoms.

But Africans did not invent slavery. It existed everywhere, dating back to the most ancient civilizations. Nor did Africans envision slavery as something that would be passed on from one generation to the next…something based exclusively on race. That was a European innovation.

Europeans had actually developed an idea over several centuries that they should not enslave each other. They could kill each other, torture each other, fight each other I wars, but Europeans did not enslave other Europeans because Christians did not enslave other Christians. The great advantage of Africans is that they were outside the European community, and so it was possible to use race as a way of providing a marker of who is enslaveable and who is not.

Sailing in ships of radical new design, armed with new weapons and new technologies, Europeans transformed slavery into a business far larger and far crueler than anything the Africans had ever done. Of course, it didn’t happen overnight. The dehumanization of an entire race was a process requiring many steps. One occurred here (Bunce Island, Sierra Leone).

This beautiful island, shrouded in fog, is home to what was once a fortress, built by the British in the 1670s.

(Isatu Smith, Bunce Island Project) Out there is the mouth of the Port Loco Creek that African middle men used to bring their slaves and goods down the Port Loco Creek through the mouth of the Port Loco Creek out there, all the way to this beach here.

So, they cane right through that gap right there? Yes. They would bring them here, then march them straight up there and sell them. On this hill, up to the treed area.

Though it’s walls have crumbled, I could still get a sense of how this place once worked. This was the main entrance into the fort. It had a double folding door, with a little room perched on top.

British officers lived here, in a lavish, 2 story mansion. There is a fireplace, a fake fireplace because there is no fuel. This is the tropics. We don’t need a fireplace in the tropics. By the slave traders who lived here as elegant. A little touch of home. A little touch of home…

The British enjoyed parties here…even a small golf course. Slaves, meanwhile, were herded like cattle. In here is the women’s and children’s slave yard. They were branded, then held in pens for shipment to the new world. So the men were over there and the women and children were right here. So they could hear each other’s cries? Definitely. They could have heard each other’s cries but could not help each other.

Let me show you the men’s slave yard. It is right through these doors. By the time they got here, they were very terrified, and then they were examined like cattle. Their eyes, teeth…and then when the slaves were taken out to be put onboard the slave ships; they were branded with the letter S on their left breast to denote that they came from Sierra Leon.

This place was not unusual. There were dozens of forts like this up and down the African coast. We’re not even sure exactly how many slaves passed through this island. 50,000 at least. We know the names of a handful, and the stories of a precious few.

In 1756 a British ship named The Hare set sail for Charleston carrying 80 African slaves. One of them was a 10 year old girl. We don’t know where she was from. We don’t know her parent’s names, but we do know the name that her master gave her. Priscilla.

Priscilla was at the start of a journey that would change her life forever. The dreaded Middle Passage. The entire experience is so horrific and so just brutalizing in ways that are just unimaginable for a contemporary audience. You have public floggings; you have decapitation, being immersed in your own bodily excrement. It is complete loss of control over your life in every way possible. Think about it at 8 or 9 or 10 year old. It is something that you are never going to forget and it is going to be etched in your memory. Women on the ship, even girls as young as Priscilla faced an added danger. They were completely at the mercy of the male crew.

Women were considered to be available prey at any given moment for the entire ship crew throughout the passage, so some women would commit suicide and some women did decide that I don’t want to bring a child into this world so they inserted some sort of piece of wood or a nail or something to, you know, to cause violence upon their body and you would also find that some women would actually die from these, these attempts.

Priscilla spent 10 weeks on the ship. She saw 13 of her fellow Africans die along the way, their corpses thrown into the ocean. Death was so common on slave ships that sharks followed in their wake, feasting on the dead bodies. As the ship drew close to shore, the slaves were rubbed with a mixture of gunpowder and oil to make them look healthier, hiding the wounds from their beatings and chains. Then Priscilla stepped into a new world.

Charleston, South Carolina. This was once the center of the slave trade for the 13 colonies. Over 40% of all of the slaves who entered our country came through this city. In Priscilla’s time, South Carolina had more black slaves than white citizens. In fact, it was called Negro Country.

Slave auctions were held on the streets of Charleston almost every day. Priscilla was bought at one of these auctions by a rice planter named Elias Ball. We are on the way to the Ball Plantation, which consisted of one half of Comingtee Plantation and about 25 African American slaves. Edward Ball is the 5^th great grandson of the man who purchased Priscilla. He’s brought me to the land where his family ran rice plantations for almost 2 centuries. So this would have been maybe one little road running through it. Yeah. The rice fields were off the river. They were right around here.

Ball told me that he’s spent years wresting with his family’s past. Priscilla is just one of 4,000 people that they owned. My dad used to talk about the plantations and Elias Ball and of the prosperity that our family had lived through, uh, but he never talked about the slaves. He said that there are 5 things that we don’t talk about in the Ball family—religion, sex, death, money, and the Negroes.

Priscilla arrived here in July 1756. She was 10. She came as an orphan...no parents, no language, no home. This was her introduction to the rest of her life. Priscilla’s new life centered around this house, and the white family that owned it. Though a ruin today, the Ball Plantation as once thriving thanks to the labor of it’s slaves. The second Elias, who bought Priscilla, bought 6 children, none of them older than 10. He liked buying children. In fact, he wrote a little memoir in which he said “Do two things with your money. Buy land and buy young slaves.” Why? ‘Better long term investment. The white folks lived here; the black folks lived about a quarter of a mile away. The rice fields were about a half a mile down the road and that’s where all of the work of producing the money took place.

Rice, that’s why Priscilla was here. Rice fields like these were making a fortune for slave owners. Don’t let their beauty fool you. These places were death traps. The swamp ground was covered with snakes. The tropical air was filled with malaria mosquitoes. A third of South Carolina’s slaves died within a year of their arrival, and nearly two thirds of all children were dead before they turned 16. But Priscilla beat the odds. She and her family survived.

The Balls are fanatical about keeping records. They had books that listed the birthdays of all of the slave children, books that listed the deaths of all of the slave adults, and all of this stuff is collected in archives of about 10,000 pages. My God! Edward Ball spent 3 years pouring over his family’s records, here in the South Carolina Historical Society.

Hamshire, Gambia, ditto, ditto, ditto, all of these men and women came from Gambia. Ball was trying to piece together the stories of his family’s slaves. For most, he found no story at all. They survived as only a name on a page. People consumed by the brutality of slavery. There was an ordinance that if you ran away, and you were caught, you had to have 2 toes amputated. If you ran away again, and you were caught, you had to have your ears amputated. And if you ran away a third time, the punishment was castration. Oh man! Law of the land. They were not joking. They were not kidding around, yeah.

As Ball scanned page after page, he began to see one name repeated. Priscilla is 10 years old when she comes to Comingtee Plantation, and 10 years later, she is having her own children. Manimea, Priscilla’s daughter was born, and Manimea becomes the matriarch.

Ball was able to trace Priscilla’s family tree down generations, stretching from the 1750s all the way to today. For an African American, this is extraordinarily rare. Now how are your related to Priscilla? She is my great, great, great, great, great grandmother. Through your mother? Through my father. Through your father. This is Thomalind Polite. She and her husband, Antwan are carrying on a family line that began in Sierra Leon more than 250 years ago. I was 19 years old when I first found out. It really hit me like…Oh my gosh…you know this was my fifth great grandmother. Yeah but she had to be tough. She had to be! She had to be! I got some of that from her. Thomalind is remarkably lucky. She actually knows the name of her original African ancestor. I don’t know anyone else who could do this. For nearly all African Americans, including me, our original ancestors will remain forever anonymous and invisible.

(Vincent Brown, Historian) This was not an accident. Removing people from genealogy is very important to making a slave. So if I only call you by your first name, and never by a family name, I’m indicating to everybody that you have no family, right? You are just Jimmy. Your just Sam, you’re just Sarah, right? So they will occupy a station that everybody will publicly recognize is at the lowest level of society.

Masters worked methodically to erase the identities of their slaves, so that they would be more productive. And these tactics were quite effective. Slaves built this country. They built roads and bridges, factories and farms, towns and cities, but they built something else as well….something all their own…a culture.

(James H. Sweet, Historian) As much as slave masters tried to control the worlds of their slaves, they were vastly unsuccessful. There was a persistence in history and culture and names that went across the Atlantic despite the best efforts of Europeans.

We tend to assume that the slave is a cipher, right? Because that’s ideology. That’s the ideology of slavery…that the slave is simply an extension of the master’s will. That’s the plan, that’s the idea, but that’s not really what you can ever do to a human being. Human beings always find a way to assert their own prerogatives, so black people create new kinds of cultural patterns that didn’t obtain in African that weren’t those of the whites but were something new in the Americas.

This garden signifies crops that enslaved African Americans would have grown. One of the most enduring expressions of any culture is food. Even today, we can try to access the world of our ancestors by tasting it.

What do we have here Michael? Well, you have a late 18^th, early 19^th century feast without the okra, just for you. Michael Twitty is a food historian. We have calla congree, which is basically black eyed pea fritters from New Orleans. And then a lot of people in this region had 3 salt herrings a week. He’s cooked me an 18^th century meal to show how slaves from different parts of Africa crafted a distinct African American cuisine. See you get to taste. Hominy or mush, ash cakes, hoe cakes, etc. would have been a staple of your diet. How about some hopping john? Oh you’ve got to have that. Umm…you’re a good cook, man. Thank you sir! This came out of my garden yesterday afternoon. Wow! From Spartanburg, South Carolina, but all of those recipes are straight out of history books. Sweet potatoes are great! Um hum…

When in the history of human kind has an enslaved people revolutionized the way that people who enslaved them ate, drank, believed the way Africans did in the Americas?

That’s sorghum? Yea this is the first time that I have never seen it. It looks just like corn. Twitty has traced the roots of foods that connect Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas in a vast black Atlantic culture…a culture the slaves even propagated among their white masters. It amazed me…one reference was one of the former governors of Virginia, his wife said that no one bakes a ham better than a big, fat Negro mammy. Oh really? And you think about this, Ham is a food that was not invented in Africa. No. But somehow, we got our hands on the sugar cane. And our ancestors blackified it. We blackified it. We took everything and made it like better and made it more soulful if you will. Let’s put a little pineapple, cherries on there, maple syrup, brown sugar. Now you know we don’t do maple syrup. Excuse me, OK, brown sugar, brown sugar.

It’s a Creoleazation process. So, while the okra soup, and the black-eyed peas and hopping john, and the red rice and jambalaya and gumbo, blah, blah, blah is going to the master’s house, those cooks are bringing European western dishes into the slave quarters. The flow is going both ways. The flow is going both ways, and what we have to recognize is everybody puts their stamp on it.

Food was not the only thing flowing throughout the Atlantic world. So were ideas…ideas about music, dance, religion, but especially ideas about freedom. Even if the masters wished otherwise.

(Annette Gordon-Reed, Historian) Black people knew they were people. Whether whites thought it or not, they knew that they were people and so if you hear words about liberty and freedom, things that they wanted, of course they would think that they applied to them.

St. Augustine, Florida, this is the oldest city in the United States. Built by the Spanish in the 1560s, and held by Spain almost continuously until 1821. This beautiful place has special meaning for African Americans because as slavery’s grip tightened in the British Colonies, Spain declared that runaway slaves could come here and be free. Why? Politics.

Colonial Spain was locked in a ferocious rivalry with Colonial England, so they welcomed any fugitive slaves who would convert to Catholicism, swear loyalty to the Spanish crown, and serve in the colonial militia. Suddenly, slaves in the British Colonies simply had to make it across the St. Mary’s River into Spanish Florida and they would be free.

(Jane Landers, Historian)They knew the geopolitics of the region that the English and the Spaniards were enemies. An enemy of my enemy is my friend sort of thing, and we often find that they get their information from the Indian groups who have gone back and forth. So the Indians say “Hey you black people, you get on a boat, you get down here to a place called St. Augustine and you’ll be cool, you’ll be free. Well, they wouldn’t have known that, but they would have known where St. Augustine was and they would have known that that Spaniards and English were at war, that the Spaniards didn’t like the English being there, and they took their lives in their hands, they get in a boat and they make it.

Soon there were so many people in St. Augustine, that the Spanish built them their own town called Fort Mose, just a few miles to the north. Nothing remains of Fort Mose. It has sunk entirely into the swamps of the Atlantic coast. But this was the first all black settlement in what would become the United States, an outpost of freedom in a slave land.

I try to imagine what it must have felt like to arrive here, after traveling through swamps, cross rivers, and through the wilderness and finally gaining your freedom at Fort Mose. Slavery breeds dreams of freedom in every human breast. African American culture is full of references to the day of jubilee, to making it to the Promised Land. While for African slaves, Fort Mose was the Promised Land, and crossing St. Mary’s River, well that was like crossing the River Jordan. So many slaves tried to run here that the British started executing them in public to staunch the flow. But even that couldn’t stop them.

1739

300 miles north of Fort Mose, just outside of Charleston, runs the Stono River. When word of the fort reached this place, it inspired one of the biggest slave revolts in the history of the British colonies. It all started right here. The site of which was once a general store, called Hutchinson’s. Sunday morning, September 9, 1739 Hutchinson’s store had been looted. Its guns and ammunition had been stolen. Two shopkeepers lay dead, their heads lying on the steps of the store, their plantations on either side of the river were burning, an army was on the move…an African army. They were headed for Fort Mose. They set out before dawn, a group of roughly 20 men. Their tactics were simple. They surrounded plantations then burned them to the ground. The ringleaders came from the Kingdom of Congo, a powerful African state. Some had military training, and they had a plan.

The slaves marched over to Pon Pon Road, which was a road that, if you took it south, it would take you down into Georgia, on into Savannah and ultimately down to Florida. They were beating drums. Now the beating of the drums was terribly important because that show us that they were attempting to draw other Africans into their midst. By afternoon, the rebel army had grown to nearly 100, and they kept moving south along what today is this highway, which still leads from South Carolina to Florida…but they didn’t make it.

Just 20 miles outside of Charleston, an armed militia caught up with them in a clearing in these woods. The survivors faced a gruesome fate. A number of the people who were captured, they’d be beheaded. Beheaded? They were beheaded by the militia men, and as was the usual practice during the time period, their severed heads were placed on top of posts along the highway… So right along here… Yeah. We would see the heads of these rebels. Yes, that’s right. And that was meant to instill fear and to teach a lesson to all who observed to try to discourage people from rebelling. This must have been the planters’ worst nightmare. It was. Absolutely. Worse nightmare. Who imagined that these Congo Africans knew anything about guns and ammunition? That’s right. That’s right. Absolutely right. This was the worst insurrection to occur in 18^th century British colonial North America.

In the wake of the rebellion, South Carolina imposed harsh new slave laws. They banned drumming and literacy, and set drastic punishments on runaways. But no laws could ever force the slaves to accept their fates. Slaves plotted revolts all over the Atlantic world. In Jamaica and Virginia, Barbados and Georgia, even in New York City. Most of them failed, but that didn’t stop the slaves from trying. They were always searching for a chance at freedom, and as time passed, freedom seemed to be drawing near.

1776

The American Revolution brought immense hope to the slaves. They heard the patriots talk of liberty and equality and it ignited their own dreams, but for the most part, those dreams were ignored. Even the greatest champion of freedom, was hesitant to extend it to black people.

This is Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate. For so many of us, an icon of American Independence, but for more than a hundred African Americans, this was a plantation where from sun up to sun down they toiled as slaves. The father of our country was also one of its largest slave owners. Salves tended his fields, and watched over his every need. One worked in these stables…a groomsman named Harry Washington. Harry heard the talk around Mount Vernon about liberty and independence, but he sensed that it wasn’t for slaves. So like many black people, he decided to take his chances with the British.

(Christopher Brown, Historian) Once the war comes, there are enslaved men and women saying hey we’d love to help you out if you would help us out. We’d be happy to help you suppress this rebellion in Massachusetts if you will grant our freedom in return. Harry joined a loyalist regiment called the black pioneers, and he wasn’t the only one. Roughly 20,000 slaves ran away to the British lines, far more than joined the patriot cause. There were a lot of Harry Washingtons in the British army. In fact, it is probably fair to say that especially in the southern colonies; the British army effort could not have been as successful as it was for a time without the assistance of former slaves. Unfortunately, most of these black loyalists were ravaged by the war.

(Annette Gordon-Reed, Historian)Many of them died. Many of them contracted small pox, they met terrible fates, many of them but you can understand why they opted for it. That gives you a measure of what slavery was like…that people would take that kind of risk.

Harry Washington was one of the lucky few. In the waning days of the war, the British put him on a ship and evacuated him to Canada. The British definitely wanted to use the blacks to help them in their struggle against the colonists, but they did not want to…had no intention of actually making them, you know, equal to them and bringing them and making them part of British society so dropped them off there and let them make their way. Harry didn’t stay long I Canada. He and his fellow black loyalists were barred from voting and exploited by local whites, so when the British set up a colony for former slaves back in Sierra Leon, Harry was among the first to emigrate. He ended up near here, one of the very few slaves who ever made it back to Africa. Harry didn’t necessarily want to go back to Africa. You know what Harry wanted? He wanted what his old master George wanted…freedom, the right to do as he pleased. Unfortunately, he did not find it here. The British government in Sierra Leon tried to limit the property rights of the black settlers. Harry fought back and was banished for insubordination. After that, he disappeared. Harry was a rebel to the end, and it’s probably best that he turned his back on America because he wouldn’t have liked what America became.

The founding fathers built a country committed to slavery. The site of Washington D.C. was chosen as our capital in order to appease southern slave owners, and why not? They held an enormous amount of power.

None of it exists without slavery. There are no settlements; there are no 13 colonies without slavery. There is not United States without slavery. There is no independence movement without slavery. The whole thing is built upon slavery. That’s why they didn’t abolish it. Slavery was a part of American society from the very beginning. When the Declaration of Independence was signed, slavery was legal in each of the 13 colonies. And take this building here, the magnificent capital. Slaves quarried and cut its oldest stones, its innermost bricks were laid by slaves. DO you see the statue of the Native American on top…the symbol of freedom? One of the people who cast it was a slave. But even if the ideals of the American Revolution were perverted by slavery, the ideals themselves endured. They lingered in the hearts of black people and they spread throughout the Atlantic world.

San Damang. At the close of the American Revolution, this was a French Colony. It was the world’s largest producer of coffee and sugar, and it had the largest concentration of slaves in the Western Hemisphere. Almost twice as many Africans were brought here as were brought to the entire United States. In essence, this was the epicenter of slavery in the new world. But in August of 1791, this colony began to collapse, as the slaves rose up against their hated masters. Inspired by the same ideals as the American patriots, they fought off European armies and founded a new nation, Haiti…the world’s first black republic. Never before in history, had slaves overthrown their masters.

The Haitian Revolution becomes this great beacon of hope, right? For what’s possible. Another world is possible. Slavery can end. How in the world would a slave, completely illiterate, stuck on a plantation, hear about the Haitian Revolution? Well, illiterate does not mean ignorant, right? That’s the first thing that you have to understand. Which is that news is travelling all around aboard ships, right? So sailors, they’re spreading news about what is going on and then the slaves hear ideas about freedom and equality and liberty that are incredibly important to black people, and so they raise hopes. Uh huh. To an extremely high level.

Unfortunately, here in the United States, those hopes were dashed. African Americas had to wait almost a century for their freedom. But even so, Haiti had a profound impact. For generation after generation, Haiti was the source of immense pride. A free black nation in a world that thought black people were fit only to be slaves. That pride can still be seen today if you know where to look.

(New Orleans, Louisiana) These men are a part of a celebration that stretches back almost 2 centuries…a celebration of our living connection to Haiti. They get up before dawn on Mardi Gras morning and parade through New Orleans, waking the city to celebrate with a Haitian vodoon tradition. You never know, you might not wake up tomorrow, so they make sure that everybody wakes up for Mardi Gras day. So if they don’t wake up, they’re dead. If they don’t wake up, they’re dead, right. So that’s they job. We make sure that everybody enjoys Mardis Gras.

They’ve been doing this since 1819, soon after a group of Haitian refugees came to New Orleans via Cuba and started the tradition. It’s one of the oldest parts of Mardi Gras, and a living reminder that African American history isn’t limited to the story of the United States. Its part of a much wider history…the history of a people scattered like sand throughout the Atlantic world.

The way we think of history is in national terms, so U.S. history is U.S. history and it’s discreet from Jamaican history or Haitian history or British history or French history, and it turns out that National history really emerges in these Atlantic cross currents, right? That involved Africa, Caribbean, South America, Europe and North America.

African American culture was born in the mixing of people and ideas from all over the Atlantic world. Mixing made us strong. It gave us hope. It sustained us.

Less than a mile from the Mardi Gras parades runs the mighty Mississippi River. In the decades after the Haitian Revolution, this river became the site and symbol of a new phase in American slavery, the violent rise of the Deep South. But the memory of Haiti was never forgotten. It was mixed into the fabric of African American culture. It became an inspiration for countless numbers of black people who dared to dream of their freedom.