“The Red Letter Year” 0

When I took my first class in Virginia history in third grade (yes, they used to teach history in school) that was the label given to 1619. The label referred to three events in that year:

• The first meeting of the House of Burgesses, the Virginia colony’s legislature.
• The arrival of the first English women to the colony.
• The arrival of the first “shipment* of Negro (as the text book styled it) slaves.

The Hartford Courant’s Frank Harris, III, muses on how to recognize the last event on that list. Here’s a bit of his musings:

For blacks, slavery was our holocaust and our Kristallnacht — it was bodies smashed and shattered over centuries, tossed into the oceans and rivers and creeks, burned into the embers that blackened America’s soil and soul.

It should not be forgotten. But how do we not forget it?

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*Yes, “shipment” was the word in the text.

I paid attention in history class, even in third grade. I paid attention in history class up through graduate work in history, with a focus on “U. S. Southern,” and much subsequent reading, because the past explains the present.

In that text and in the construct it portrayed, persons were “cargo” because they were Not White. And many would take us back to those days.