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 the Negro. I've always wanted to tell their history.
Five centuries in the making. It's a living history. And I've traveled around the country.
And across the globe to chronicle it. As-salamu alaykum. Did any of you receive wealth inherited from the slave trade? Black people changed American society. America probably wouldn't have much of a popular culture without black people.
We blackified it. We took everything and made it, like, made it better. You're 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 its ideals, even when it abandoned them.
In these six 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.
African-American story begins here on the Atlantic Ocean. Africans cross 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 America, came here with 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 four 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.
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 Port 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 sort of a startup, if you will. You even gave him a little cash, 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 African-ness, these things define him, mark him as an outsider. The stigma of blackness. The stigma of blackness. And the fact that the status was tied to that observable trait was one which is very difficult to surmount.
After Johnson died, a court ruled that he was, quote, 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 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. Africans in those cities than there were Europeans.
Here I'm 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 the British are not innovating when they settle Jamestown. They're trying to catch up.
American historians sometimes treat the emergence of slavery as a mystery. Right? We all have some people, how did all 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.
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 strongly than say white Europeans did. Slavery was ongoing before the Europeans came. It was just a common business. They come here in this wharf. Here is the landing pad 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 on these boats.
Yes, but our people, we are not thinking about misery. It was a lucrative business. As-salamu alaykum.
What is your name, Professor Gates? I was surprised to find out that in Port Loko today, there are still many families whose ancestors profited from the trade. And some of them were willing to do it. to tell me about it.
Good. Just speak from your heart. Did any of you receive wealth inherited from the slave trade?
500 and sleeves 500 500 my god so he was very rich we are rich and there the road account of God I'm not saying I then baby so I can't ban it oh and I put a boy up I bought a room for me away would Chiefs wage war just to get slaves oh yes now I'm a second Kalanta a pink arm a beer my bang In America, we think black men were selling black people to the white men. But when you see it, do you see it as Temne were buying Loko, Mende were buying Temne, etc.? Is there a difference?
Were all black people black? Only black people are black. So for 13 years, we don't speak the same language.
I don't like what you like. You know, we don't just live in harmony. Though some find it difficult to face, the crucial role of Africans in the slave trade is now well documented. Historians estimate that the overwhelming majority of the slaves shipped to the New World were captured 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 in 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's enslaveable and who's 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.
This beautiful island, shrouded in fog, is home to what was once a fortress, built by the British in the 1670s. Out there is the mouth of the Putluck. creek african middlemen used to bring their slaves and goods down the putloko creek through the mouth of the putloko creek out there all the way to this beach here so they came right through that gap right there they would bring them here they marched them straight up there and so this hill on to the trading area Though its walls have long 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 patched on top. British officers live 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 slavery.
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 they could not help each other. Yes. In fact, let me show you the main slave yard.
It's right through these doors. Do it. By the time they got here, we were very terrified. And then they were examined like cattle, their eyes, teeth. And then when the slaves were taken out to be put on board the slave ships, they were branded with the letter S on their left breast to denote that they came from Sierra Leone.
The Slave Yard 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 parents. names, but we do know the name that her master gave her, Priscilla.
Wait in the water, children. Wait in the water. Priscilla was at the start of a journey that would change her life forever.
The dreaded Middle Passage. Wait in the water. The entire experience is so horrific and so just brutalizing in ways that are just unimaginable for the 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 eight, a nine, a ten year old, it is something that you're never going to forget and it's 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 time. A 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... nail or something to cause violence upon their body and you also find that some women would actually die from 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 it. 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're on the way to the Ball Plantation, which consisted of one half of Cumming Tea Plantation and about 25 African American slaves.
Edward Ball is the fifth great grandson of the man who purchased the land. purchase Priscilla. He's brought me to the land where his family ran rice plantations for almost two centuries. A landlord with a thousand acres.
So this would have been maybe one little road running through it. Yeah. And the rice fields.
were off the river. They were right around here. Ball told me he had spent years wrestling 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 all of the prosperity that our family had lived through, but he never talked about the slaves. He said they were a friend.
There are five things we don't talk about in the Ball family. Religion, sex, death, money, and the Negroes. Priscilla arrived here in July 1756. She was ten.
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 was once thriving, thanks to the labor of its slaves. Priscilla bought six children, none of them older than ten.
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 half a mile down that road, and that's where all 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 malarial 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 the slave children.
Books that listed the deaths of all the slave adults. And all of this stuff is collected in archive of about 10,000 pages. My God. Edward Ball spent three years pouring over his family's records here in the South Carolina Historical Society.
Hampshire, Gambia, ditto, ditto, ditto, all of these men and women from Gambia. London. Ball was trying to trying to piece together the stories of his family's slaves.
For most, he found no story at all. They survived only as names on a page. People consumed by the brutality of slavery. Samson.
There was an ordinance where if you ran away and you were caught, you had to have... Two 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. getting around yeah as ball scanned page after page he began to see one name repeated priscilla's 10 years old when she comes to coming t plantation and 10 years later Later, she's having her own children. Monimia, Priscilla's daughter, was born.
And Monimia becomes the matriarch. And her grandchildren have children. 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 you related to Priscilla?
She is my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother. Through your mother's line? Through my father's. This is Tomalin Polite. She and her husband, Antoine, are carrying on a family line.
that began in Sierra Leone 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. My grandmother, yeah.
But she had to be tough. She had to be. She had to be. I got some of that from her. I was going to ask.
Tomlin 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. 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.
right that you have no family right you're just Jimmy you just Sam you just Sarah right so they'll occupy a station that everybody will publicly recognize is at the lowest rung 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. Music They built roads and bridges, factories and farms, towns and cities, but they built something else as well, something all their own, a culture. As much as slave masters try to make a difference, they don't.
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 Africa, 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, would have been... 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 18th, early 19th century feast without the okra, just for you. Michael Twitty is a food historian.
We have kala kongri, which are basically black-eyed pea fritters from New Orleans. And then a lot of people in this region had three salt herrings a week. He's cooked me an 18th century meal to show how...
slaves from different parts of Africa crafted a distinct African-American cuisine. So you get a taste. Hominy or mush, ash cakes, hoe cakes, et cetera, would have been the staple of your diet.
Give me some hot and jump. Oh, you got to have that. You're a good cook, man.
Thank you, sir. This came out of my garden yesterday afternoon. Wow.
From Spartanburg, South Carolina. But all those recipes, they're straight out of history books. The people here are great.
When in the history of humankind has an enslaved people revolutionized the way the people who enslaved them ate, drank, believed, the way Africans did in the Americas? That's sorghum? Yeah. This is the first time I've ever seen it.
Well, you see, 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 is amazing. 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. Really?
And you think about this, ham as a food 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 better and made it more soulful, if you will. Just put a little pineapple cherries on there. Brown sugar, now you know maple syrup, we don't do maple syrup. Excuse me, brown sugar, brown sugar.
It's a creolization process. So while the okra soup and the black eyed peas and the Hoppin'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 quarter.
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.
Black people knew they were people. Whether whites thought it or not, they knew they were people. And so if you hear words about liberty and freedom, things that they wanted, of course they would think it would apply 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. They knew the geopolitics of the region, that the English and the Spaniards were... enemy of my enemies, 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, if you get on the boat, you get down to a place called St. Augustine, you'll be caught. cool you'll be free well they wouldn't have known that but they'd have known where saint augustine was and they would have known the spaniards and the 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 black 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 is sunk to the ground.
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. Try to imagine what it must have felt like to arrive here after traveling through swamps, across rivers, and through the wilderness, 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. Well, 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. 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 what was once a general store called Hutchinson's. Sunday morning, September 9th, 1739. Hutchinson's store had been looted.
Its guns and ammunition had been stolen. Two shopkeepers lay dead, their severed heads lying on the steps of the store. Plantations on either side of the river were burning.
An army was on the move. An African army. They were headed for Fort Mosea.
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. Slaves marched over to Pon Pon Road, which was a road that if you took it south, it would take you down into Georgia, down into Savannah, and ultimately all the way down to Florida.
They were beating drums. Now, the beating of the drums is terribly important because that shows 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 the same fate. a gruesome fate. A number of the people who were were captured they'd be beheaded.
Beheaded? They would be beheaded by the militiamen. and as was a usual practice during the time period, their severed heads were placed on top of posts along the highway.
So right along here, we would have seen 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 rebellion.
This must have been the planters worst nightmare. It was, absolutely. Worse than the worst nightmare. They couldn't imagine that these Congo Africans knew anything about guns and ammunition. That's right, that's right, that's right, absolutely right.
This was the worst insurrection to occur in 18th century British colonial North America. In the wake of the rebellion, South Carolina imposed harsh new slave laws. They banned drumming and... ...and set drastic punishments on runaways. But no laws ever could 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.
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 100 African Americans, this was a plantation, where from sunup to sundown, they toiled as slaves. The father of our country was also one of its largest slave owners.
Slaves 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 it wasn't meant for slaves.
So like many black people, he decided to take his chances with the British. 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's 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. Many of them died. Many of them contracted smallpox.
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 equal to them and bringing them and making them part of British society.
So drop them off there and let them make their way. Harry didn't stay long in 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 Leone, 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. But 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 Leone 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... It would be 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 DC 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 is no 13 colonies without slavery.
There is no United States without slavery. There's 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, our magnificent Capitol.
Slaves... quarried and cut its oldest stones. Its innermost bricks were laid by slaves.
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. Saint-Domingue. 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. 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 doesn't mean ignorant, right?
That's the first thing we have to understand, which is that news is traveling all around aboard ships, right? So sailors, they're spreading news about what's 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 to an extremely high level. Unfortunately...
Here in the United States, those hopes were dashed. African Americans had to wait almost a century for their freedom. But even so, Haiti had a profound impact. For generation after generation, Haiti was a 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. These men are part of a celebration that stretches back almost two 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 Vodun tradition. I can dig that. You might not wake up tomorrow. That's right.
make sure that everybody wake up on Mardi Gras day. So if they don't wake up, they're dead. If they don't wake up, they're dead. That's the message. If you don't wake up, you're dead.
That's their job to wake everybody up and make sure that you enjoy Mardi 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.
It's 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 US history is US 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 involve Africa, the 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. They would need that inspiration in the harsh and dreadful years to come.
Next time on the African Americans, the struggle for freedom continues. The Underground Railroad. road makes me want to claim slaves as my ancestors here's the coverage that sam hidden my god this is so tiny the african-americans many rivers to cross the african-american story continues online at pbs.org slash many rivers with streaming video and more The African Americans, Many Rivers to Cross is available on DVD for $34.99.
The companion book is also available for $34.95 plus shipping. To order, call 1-800-336-1917.