📜 The 1619 Project Leaves Out the First Africans of 1526

Brief Description

This section presents original, verifiable documents from the 1619 era that clarify what that year actually represents—and what it does not. Drawing from Virginia Company records, colonial court cases, assembly minutes, and private correspondence, these sources show that 1619 marked an English transaction, not the beginning of African presence or racialized slavery in America. When read alongside Spanish colonial records from 1526, the documents reveal a longer, more complex history in which Africans arrived earlier, resisted captivity, exercised legal agency, and lived as free people decades before English law hardened slavery into a racial system.