Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

Harriot recalls his Uncle James, called “Uncle Junior.” Junior had a passion for establishing truth at all costs, interjecting into family stories to correct the record on minor details. Harriot learned at an early age that stories are not inherently trustworthy on their own and require independent fact-checking absent of any agenda besides pursuing the truth. This research method informed Harriot’s studies of American history.

Beginning with the Jamestown settlers, Harriot contradicts the established story of the Pilgrims as resourceful and brave. Harriot states that these English colonizers were more incompetent than villainous. Despite their lack of farming, mining, and building skills, they tried to establish colonies on a coast that was clearly inhabited already. They were met by the Indigenous American community of Tsenacommacah, a geographically defined group of 31 independently governed tribes that worked together. Ruled by King Wahunsenacah, Tsenacommacah violently resisted the invasion in the beginning. It soon became clear to the Tsenacommacah community, however, that the Jamestown settlers would kill themselves through incompetence without their intervention. Famine-stricken England had not sent them out with many provisions, and it was too late in the year to grow crops. While Portuguese Catholics sent soldiers out to conquer new territories, the English sent aristocrats instead, with no survival skills. After capturing John Smith, the celebrated English mercenary, Wahunsenacah took pity on the struggling settlers and gave them some food supplies to tide them over until more provisions arrived from England. Though the Jamestonians portrayed themselves to the English back home as wildly successful, in actuality, most of these settlers died of starvation and disease. Harriot likens the Powhatan support of the settlers to a welfare program, which Wahunsenacah discontinued after seeing the settlers go through their provisions without stocking up for the future. The settlers decided to inform King Wahunsenacah that he was now the subject of King James I, and therefore owed them support as fellow countrymen. In response, the king began a siege of Jamestown, keeping the settlers from hunting or fishing for food.

Later, however, the settler John Rolfe started to grow tobacco he had obtained from the West Indies. With this new cash crop, which was perfectly suited to Virginia’s soil, combined with the brutality of Samuel Argall, the Deputy Governor of Virginia, the settlers started to obtain a slim advantage. Rolfe returned to Virginia, but the wholesale lack of agricultural skill among the English settlers meant that their promising tobacco fortune was doomed unless they could import immigrants with actual agricultural skills. Those immigrants came in the form of kidnapped Africans sold by a Spanish enslaver. Unpaid labor from African farmers saved the doomed settlement by maximizing profit.

Chapter 1 Unit Review

Every chapter in Black AF History ends with at least one Unit Review and often adds supplemental mini-narratives. This quiz addresses the mislabeling of invaders as “settlers,” the misconception about who qualifies as the “first Americans,” and how America defines the terms “savage” and “civilized.” An “essay question” asks the reader to truthfully explain the motives of the settlers to Wahunsenacah in a way that is least likely to make him turn to murder.

Chapter 2 begins by exploring the history of European colonization and the slave trade. The Catholic Church had unquestioned political control over Europe for at least a millennium, except for parts of the Iberian Peninsula. North African and Arab Muslims controlled parts of the peninsula. Spain and Portugal eventually won full control of the region, but the effort bankrupted them. Henrique of Aviz, a prince of Portugal, sought to gain more resources by exploring and conquering parts of the North African coast. Rare resources like precious metals, fur, and spices were in high demand in Europe, and any European who could access the riches of North Africa and the Middle East would become wealthy. Henrique copied North African sailing vessels and ocean-mapping techniques to navigate the trade winds of the Mediterranean Sea. This gave Portugal an immense advantage in trade. Henrique discovered, however, that the true wealth lay in buying enslaved people in Africa and transporting them to Europe. Henrique set up the Casa de Guine, a “state-run commercial entity” that controlled and distributed trade out of Africa, including enslaved people (32).

At this point, Christopher Columbus, an Italian sailor who had worked on Portuguese ships his whole life, began to plan to reach India by sailing West, away from Africa. After his navigation plans were rejected by Portugal and England, Columbus managed to get Queen Isabella of Spain and a Medici-allied banker named Amerigo Vespucci to jointly fund a venture to India via the Atlantic Ocean. He wrecked one of his vessels in modern-day Haiti and then returned to Spain via the Portuguese coast to report back to Queen Isabella. The Portuguese, despite Columbus’s efforts to keep the voyage a secret, had already surmised that Columbus had found new land in the West. To stop any Portuguese attempts to steal their land, Spain quickly sent its army of conquistadores, literally “conquerors,” to strip the “West Indies” (or the Caribbean) of its precious resources, including people.

North and South America were quickly explored and stripped of resources by the Spanish and the Portuguese. European diseases swept through the Native populations, eliminating more than 95% of the Native people of the Caribbean in thirty years. Since there weren’t enough Indigenous Americans to act as a subjugated labor class, the Spanish and Portuguese shipped in enslaved Africans. They specifically chose African people to circumvent papal law against enslaving Christian captives.

Chapter 2 Unit Review

This unit review discusses Christopher Columbus’s true qualifications and nature, the people responsible for slavery, and why America was called the “New Word.” Additionally, this chapter contains two supplements and a Unit Review.

Supplement 1, “Before ‘Before,’ the First African Americans”

Harriot notes that the first Africans in America were not enslaved. The first recorded African American, Juan Garrido, was born in West Africa and became a sailor in Portugal. Juan Garrido, at 15 years old, joined Juan Ponce de Leon’s expedition to the New World. Garrido, as part of Ponce de Leon’s crew, discovered Florida. Garrido later joined Hernan Cortes for the Spanish conquest of Mexico and also ventured with Cortes to the coast of California, meaning that a Black man was in Florida, Mexico, and California almost a century before the Mayflower arrived in Virginia. Meanwhile,

Mustafa “Esteban” Azemmouri, a person enslaved by Spanish conquerors, escaped while hounded by the Apalachee and other tribes into Texas. Esteban was multilingual and quickly learned the sign language Indigenous Americans used for trading between tribes. He was such an impressive explorer that Viceroy Mendoza of Mexico City sent him to explore the territory north of them. Esteban supposedly died at the hands of the Zuni people, though some scholars believe he collaborated with the tribe to fake his own death. Though he was erased from white American history, Esteban was immortalized in Indigenous American legends as a dark-skinned man who traveled through more of America than any white man at that time. The Pueblo Indians of New Mexico describe their first encounter with Europeans thusly: “[T]he first white man our people saw was a black man” (51).

Chapter 2 Unit Review 2

The quiz covers the roles of the first African Americans, the proper names for Indigenous people, and the identities of the first settlers in America. An activity asks the reader to identify colonizers in a list of characters from Chapter 2.

Supplement 2: “The Real Wakanda”

This supplement covers the medieval West African empire of Mali. In 1324, King Musa I of Mali built universities and mosques in Africa while Europe struggled through extreme poverty and famine. Instead of using violence to conquer new territories, Musa used economic policies to annex the different city-states in his region. When Musa went on the Hajj, or the sacred Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, he handed out so much gold to citizens that he collapsed the entire Middle East gold market. Unbothered, Musa simply borrowed as much gold as he could from moneylenders along the way back, stabilizing the market, until he got to Mali and repaid the loans with interest. On his return, Musa also brought architects and builders from Spain and Egypt. Because of him, European maps begin to show the kingdom of Mali in the mid-1300s.

Chapter 3 covers the history of the state of South Carolina. According to Harriot, for Black Americans, South Carolina stands as the “capital of the known world” (56). South Carolina’s economy of enslaved labor exemplified the false democracy of America as a whole. In the early 1600s, Jamestown’s traders had trouble enticing workers to come to the colonies. They came up with a solution: They offered land grants to any investor who provided funds for poor people to move to the colonies. A landowner could get the rights to 50 acres of land for each person they brought over to work. These laborers would be indentured servants who would work for their eventual freedom.

George Menefie, a merchant, found a loophole in 1638, however. He claimed more than a third of his 3,000 acres by bringing over enslaved Black Africans, who could never earn their freedom. This method of land acquisition took off, leading to the exportation of many more Africans to Virginia. Additionally, in 1662, Virginia declared that children born of an enslaved mother were also enslaved. Unlike the poor immigrants from white countries, the African captives and their children were enslaved in perpetuity. This solved Jamestown’s labor shortage and enshrined slavery as a uniquely “American idea” (58).

In 1663, King Charles of England granted eight men the right to establish the British colony of Carolina, giving them almost free rein to set laws. These “Lord Proprietors” recruited the celebrated philosopher John Locke to help write the constitution of Carolina. Locke advocated for the free white men of Carolina to have “absolute power” over their enslaved African immigrants. The Carolina colony, lacking farmers with experience in farming on the coast, abducted and imported Africans from the West Coast of Africa. These farmers introduced rice to Carolina, bringing their expertise in the complexities of rice agriculture to help the crop prosper in the less-than-ideal climate of the Carolinas.

The enslavers quickly learned that African women were the ones who “possessed the engineering and agricultural knowledge necessary” to grow rice (61). Though enslavers had mostly kidnapped African men for labor at that point, they began to steal more women. Soon, the gender ratio was roughly 1:1. The particular desirable skills of the enslaved people directly contradicts the traditional narrative of enslaved people as unskilled and uneducated. In fact, their skills made them even more valuable to enslavers. While women, called “field gals,” ran the rice farming, the men of West Africa, particularly Ghana and The Gambia, showed their skill at herding and tending cattle. Called the “cow boys,” these enslaved men far outstripped white cowherders in skill, making them highly sought-after.

Life on a rice plantation was dangerous, however. The high risk of disease meant that enslavers didn’t expect their captives to live past 19. Malaria, yellow fever, and other contagious diseases regularly decimated the enslaved population. The danger caused white enslavers to stay away, however, allowing Black Americans to develop their own rich culture far from the intervention of enslavers. The inter-ethnic collection of Black Africans from all over Africa blended together to form a cultural community they called the Gullah Geechee. By 1776, the Gullah Geechee made South Carolina the number one exporter of rice to England and the highest per capita income in the British colonies. South Carolina was particularly well-known for its slave trade, thus its title as the “slave capital of the New World” (65).

The relative freedom experienced by enslaved people in South Carolina meant that they often rebelled against their captors, using sophisticated methods of stealth and survival to escape their notice and conduct armed revolts. In 1720 and 1730, enslaved Black Americans took violent action against enslavers in attempts to upend the exploitative power structure.

Chapter 3 Unit Review

Chapter 3’s quiz concerns the role of Jamestown in history, the true beginning of Black history, and the true beginning of American history. An activity asks the reader to assign races to increasingly convoluted examples of ethnic and national ancestry.

Supplement 1: “Ana Nzinga”

This supplement covers the biography of Ana Nzinga, a royal from the kingdom of Ndongo in present-day Angola. Nzinga, when asked to negotiate with the slave-trade-facilitating Portuguese in 1619, agreed. She negotiated an agreement that crippled their slave trading, but the Portuguese reneged on it and continued to steal Ndongo citizens. Through fraught political circumstances, Nzinga eventually took the throne of Ndongo from a usurper. She fought a war against the Portuguese for 30 years, while expanding her empire. She offered amnesty to enslaved Africans in Europe if they could escape to her kingdom. She outlawed slavery in all of her territories, destroying the Portuguese slave trade, bankrupting them, and defeating them in 1657.

Supplement 2: “The Unenslaving of Jemmy”

This supplement tells the story of Jemmy, an enslaved Black American in South Carolina. Most likely a warrior captured in battle in Angola and sold by the enemy army to slave traders, Jemmy understood combat, strategy, and war tactics. He used those skills to facilitate an armed rebellion in 1739. Jemmy and his 20 or so rebels stole firearms from a hardware store, gaining more rebels along the way. They sang and danced and played drums as they marched through Charleston. White observers reported them as drunk, unaware that their war dancing was a form of communication from West Africa. After the governor of South Carolina mustered up a white militia, Jemmy’s army was defeated. This incident led to an outburst of panic and paranoia among enslavers and their families. Blaming the rebellion on the fact that the rebels were born in Africa, whites paused the transatlantic slave trade for more than a decade. When the African slave trade started again, enslavers purposely avoided the Congo-Angola region out of fear of warriors like Jemmy.

Supplement 3: “How White People Were Invented”

This supplement discusses W. E. B. Du Bois’s essay, “The Souls of White Folk.” Du Bois states that whiteness is a recent concept, not acknowledged in the ancient or medieval worlds, only suddenly becoming important when it dictated property ownership and cultural power. Whiteness didn’t exist until “white people needed slaves” (74).

In 1857, the Dred Scott v. Sanford Supreme Court case ruled that Black people were not included in the category of “citizens” in the US Constitution. Crucially, they ruled this about all Black people, not just enslaved Black people. Still, whiteness, despite its harsh defense of itself as a superior category of humanity, is a slippery concept. Concluding the supplement, Harriot states that “whiteness is fear” (77).