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Re: Which had a greater impact on you....Slavery or Colonialism?
No one knows the hour or the day of the Black landing. But there is not the slightest doubt about the month. John Rolfe, who betrayed Pocahontas and experimented with tobacco leaves, was there; and he said, in a letter to his superior, that the ship arrived "about the latter end of August" in 1619. Rolfe had a nose for nicotine, but he was obviously deficient in historical matters, for he added gratuitously that the ship "brought not anything but 20 and odd Negroes." Concerning which the most charitable thing to say is that John Rolfe was probably pulling his superior's leg. For in the context of the meaning of America, it can be said without exaggeration that no ship ever called at an Amer-ican port with a more important cargo. In the hold of that ship, in a manner of speaking, was the whole gorgeous panorama of Black America, was jazz and the spirituals and the Electric Slide. Bird was there and Bigger and Malcolm and millions of other X's and crosses, along with Mahalia singing, Gwendolyn Brooks rhyming, Duke Ellington composing, James Brown grunting, Paul Robeson emoting, and Michael Jordan dunking. It was all there in embryo in the 160-ton ship.
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No one knows the hour or the day of the Black landing. But there is not the slightest doubt about the month. John Rolfe, who betrayed Pocahontas and experimented with tobacco leaves, was there; and he said, in a letter to his superior, that the ship arrived "about the latter end of August" in 1619. Rolfe had a nose for nicotine, but he was obviously deficient in historical matters, for he added gratuitously that the ship "brought not anything but 20 and odd Negroes." Concerning which the most charitable thing to say is that John Rolfe was probably pulling his superior's leg. For in the context of the meaning of America, it can be said without exaggeration that no ship ever called at an Amer-ican port with a more important cargo. In the hold of that ship, in a manner of speaking, was the whole gorgeous panorama of Black America, was jazz and the spirituals and the Electric Slide. Bird was there and Bigger and Malcolm and millions of other X's and crosses, along with Mahalia singing, Gwendolyn Brooks rhyming, Duke Ellington composing, James Brown grunting, Paul Robeson emoting, and Michael Jordan dunking. It was all there in embryo in the 160-ton ship.
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