The African Experience in Colonial Virginia

The State of Virginia recognizes the 1619 landing of Africans at Point Comfort (present-day Hampton) as a complicated beginning. This collection of new essays reckons with this historical fact, with discussions of the impacts 400 years later. Chapters cover different perspectives about the “20 and odd” who landed, offering insights into how enslavement continues to affect the lives of their descendants. The often overlooked experiences of women in enslavement are discussed.

Colita Nichols Fairfax is a professor, Honors College Senior Faculty Fellow, and inaugural Faculty Fellow with the Center for African American Public Policy at Norfolk State University. She was the co-chairman of the City of Hampton 2019 Commemorative Commission, and was a member of the State of Virginia’s American Evolution 2019 Commission’s African Arrival Committee. She is the current chairman of the State of Virginia’s Board of Historic Resources.

Edited by Colita Nichols Fairfax

Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 222
Bibliographic Info: bibliographies, index
Copyright Date: 2021
pISBN: 978-1-4766-7808-5
eISBN: 978-1-4766-4002-0
Imprint: McFarland

Acknowledgments ix
Foreword
Justin E. Fairfax 1
Introduction
Colita Nichols Fairfax 3
The “Middle Passage”: The Enforced Migration of Africans Across the Atlantic
Paul E. Lovejoy 15
Race and Constructions of “the Negro” in Colonial Virginia
Anthony Q. Hazard, Jr. 55
The Other Amazing Grace from a Slave Ship
James A. Forbes, Jr. 69
1619: A Conceptual Worldview Marker in Africana Cultural Memory Studies
Christel N. Temple 80
Twin Events of Summer 1619 in Tidewater Virginia, and the Prospect for Government of, for, and by the American People: A Commentary
Peter Wallenstein 101
Engendering Slavery in Virginia: An Examination of Blacks’ First Century in the Old Dominion
Maureen Elgersman Lee 107
“Wash Me and I Shall Be Whiter Than Snow”: A Living Historiography of African Women and Christianity in the Virginia Colony
Valerie M. Joyce 120
What Life? Experiences of Enslaved Africans in Virginia
Colita Nichols Fairfax 137
Posttraumatic Slave Syndrome, the Patriarchal Nuclear Family Structure and African American Male-Female Relationships
Noelle M. St. Vil, Christopher St. Vil and Colita Nichols Fairfax 153
Vestiges of Slavery: The Occupational Segregation of Black Women
Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe 166
Building a Nation: United States Black Founders, Racial Ideology and the Crisis of Black Citizenship
LaGarrett J. King 182
Epilogue: E Pluribus Unum, Out of Many, One
Sophia A. Nelson 197
About the Contributors 201
Index 205