The First Africans in English America – A Heritage of Diligence and Freedom.
One of the most remarkable stories in American history pertains to the arrival in 1619 of the first Africans to the English colony at Jamestown. Down through the centuries, the descendents of those first Africans could count among their number cattle ranchers, teachers and Confederate soldiers. History is rarely neat and tidy and often flies in the face of prevailing orthodoxies. Few stories capture the imagination and offer a countervailing story of providential triumph like that handful of Bantus of Ndongo from Angola in the earliest days of the Virginia colony.