Juan Garrido and Juan Gonzalez de Leon, free African explorers, arrived in Florida in 1513 and 1521. Esteban Gomez, a black Portuguese pilot, navigated the Hudson River in 1525. Spanish colonizers took African slaves to South Carolina in 1526, and by November, the slaves revolted. Their descendants refused to be slaves for Menendez in 1565, forcing him to import other Africans for his labor needs. Jan Rodrigues, a free black man, became a resident of Manhattan in 1613. Dutch colonizers took African slaves to Western Massachusetts in 1617.

August 20, 1619 did not mark the beginning of slavery in the colonies. The myth of 1619 depends heavily on the image of dumping helpless slaves into an established colony,  which accepted the savage Africans merely to obtain assistance with menial labor. The white people in this myth are engaged, active, and intellectual. The black people are passive, lazy, and savage. This myth supports the submerged view that good Negroes learn from the white people, and do well, but the bad Negroes who refuse to learn remain savage and inherently dangerous.

The 1619 myth supports the view that the North was infected with slavery by the South, casually ignoring the North’s early dependence on slave labor, its development of the first slave/black codes, and the slave-raised cotton so necessary to its mills.

The myths that make white people good, if sometimes mistaken, and the black people bad, at least until they prove otherwise, contribute to the economic divide, the technological divide, and outright murder. The myopic focus on one date, and the deliberate exclusion of preceding events, is a big mistake. That is what 1619 means to me.