WILLIAMSBURG, Va.
On May 13, 1607, three small English ships approached Jamestown Island in Virginia carrying about 100 men and boys. King James I had granted a group of London businessmen a charter to set up an English settlement in North America — ”the New World.” The company expected them to develop industries and return a profit for the settlement’s investors.
The settlement the group founded on the banks of what they called the James River would become known as Jamestown. Instead of finding gold and riches, the English met with hard living. The settlement stood on swampy, mosquito-infested land, and they became sick from the river’s salty water.
Without the help of the American Indians who gave them food, and later a group of West Africans, who provided labor to tend the growing tobacco fields, the settlement, which marked the beginning of the United States of America, would not have survived, said Karenne Wood, who serves on the Tribal Council of the Monacan Indian Nation and is the director of the Virginia Indian Heritage Program, and Dr. Cornel West, author of Race Matters and a professor of Religion at Princeton University.
This year’s marking of the 400th anniversary of the settlement at Jamestown gives America the chance to revisit and correct stories about the relationships between these three groups, the pillaging of American Indian villages, the enslavement of Africans and the impact these events continue to have in 2007, Wood, West and a group of seven other academics said Friday on the campus of the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, Va., about 10 miles from the original settlement. Talk show host and author Tavis Smiley convened the group as part of “State of the Black Union 2007,” an annual discussion he has held since 2000.
Most history textbooks site the arrival of a group of English settlers who arrived in 1620 to Plymouth County, Mass. aboard the Mayflower as the birth of the nation. The group, known as the Pilgrims, had fled England in search of religious freedom, and history books tell the stories of their friendship with American Indians marked by a Thanksgiving celebration.
“But before the Pilgrims, you had the Jamestown Africans,” Smiley said at the start of the discussion.
