Teaser: 1619: The Arrival of the First Africans in Virginia

BackStory

History, Education

4.7 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 22 August 2019

⏱️ 2 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On Friday's episode, BackStory digs into the complicated history of 1619 and the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans to the English colonies.

In this preview, BackStory travels to Hampton, Virginia to meet with members of the Tucker family. Using oral history and official records, they’ve traced their lineage back to William Tucker, the first African American born in British North America in 1624.

Image: BackStory producer Melissa Gismondi speaks to Walter Jones, Vincent Tucker and Verrandall Tucker, at the Tucker family cemetery in Hampton, VA.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Right now we're walking to the edge of the cemetery where there were
0:06.6	markers and you can see there's a lot of crosses and a lot of
0:11.4	indentions where there are
0:15.2	unmarked graves that we were able to uncover.
0:20.3	As I mentioned there were several trees that were planted where there was
0:24.4	Africans buried, it's believed.
0:28.8	And as you can see the one with the cross there
0:32.8	represents an area that I was clearing because
0:38.8	thinking I was doing the right thing to clear certain areas to make it easier to clean
0:45.2	and what we uncovered was the remains of a skull
0:49.2	right on top of that mound almost.
0:56.1	So it's believed that the roots and the trees that have came up will push
1:02.3	up, push the body to the top.
1:06.0	And after finding that we took it off to Richmond and had it evaluated to see
1:12.7	the age of the agent and ethnic background and it turned out to be an African-American female
1:20.4	approximately 60 years old and we dedicated this area and re-buried the remains there.
1:32.4	So we felt that we had a ceremony out here and several dignitaries came and everybody
1:39.9	honored what we were doing and respected that.

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