BLACK HISTORY
DEFINING MOVEMENTS AND EVENTS: 500-1699
500-1099
• Long before the arrival of Portuguese explorers along the West Coast of Africa, ancient civilizations had developed and thrived. Most notable were the empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhai which emerged between A.D. 500 and 1600. Each had strong, ambitious rulers, great military powers, complex political and social systems, and control over abundant wealth, derived from their rich sources of gold and salt
• The peoples of West Africa had many highly developed professional specialties in endless variations, long before European slavers arrived. Some Africans possessed skills in the fields of medicine, mathematics, and astronomy. Art, learning, and technology flourished.
• Africans lived under a variety of political arrangements, each with its own language and culture. Some were large and powerful kingdoms with monarchs ruling complex political structures. Others were smaller and weaker, relying on agreements between people at village level. As has been the case throughout history and cultures, relationships between political states and groups were constantly changing
• Slavery in Africa: Slavery had existed in Africa, as it had in other parts of the world, for centuries, but it was not based on race. African slavery was more akin to European serfdom --the condition of most Europeans in the 15th century. In the Ashanti Kingdom of West Africa, for example, slaves could marry, own property and even own slaves. And slavery ended after a certain number of years of servitude. Most importantly, African slavery was never passed from one generation to another, and it lacked the racist notion that whites were masters and blacks were slaves.
1100-1200
• Slavery has a long tradition in Portugal. Muslims were taken prisoner and enslaved by Christians in the wars in Portugal during the 12th and 13th centuries
• The empire of Ghana established a thriving system of trade with Arabs at ports on the Mediterranean coast and with other kingdoms of East Africa on the Red Sea. After the fall of the empire of Ghana in the 13th century, the kingdom of Mali emerged along with the gradual spread of Islam. One of Mali's strongest rulers, Mansa Musa who came to power in 1312, extended the empire from the shores of the Atlantic to the borders of modern Nigeria, and from the margin of the tropical forests northward to the Sahara
1250
• African and Native American interaction began even before Europeans brought African slaves to the Americas. Free Africans reached the shores of the American continent as traders and settlers long before Europeans arrived. In 1975, 2 Negroid skeletons were found in the U.S. Virgin Islands. One wore a pre-Columbian Indian wrist band. They were found in layers dated to about A.D. 1250. In 1974, Polish craniologists revealed that no fewer than 13.5% of the skeletons from the pre-Columbian Olmec cemetery of Tlatilco were Negroid. Later, when African slaves were brought to the Americas, they mixed with indigenous peoples from North America to South America. In the early days of slavery, indigenous peoples of the Americas and Africans were enslaved together. Sometimes, African slaves escaped to Native American villages on various parts of the American continent.1300-1440
• Mansa Musa became widely known as a result of his lavish pilgrimage to Mecca after which Mali was considered one of the great empires of the Muslim world, even by the maritime nations of southern Europe. Eventually, conflict between Islam and the traditional religions of West Africa led to internal struggle, disrupting the whole trading network of northern and western Africa. After the fall of the empire of Mali, the formation of the empire of Songhi began. While over the years African slaves had been traded along the trans-Saharan routes, it was in the 15th century under the leadership of Songhi's powerful and ambitious ruler, Askia Mohammed, that the trade in slaves to Europe began on a wide scale basis
1441
• Start of European slave trading in Africa (exclusively to Europe and the Atlantic Islands). The Portuguese capture 12 Africans in Mauritania and take them to Portugal 1441 for Prince Henry (the third son of the King of Portugal)
• Portugal established forts along the coast of Africa and established treaties with African heads of state to effect a trade in human beings. Initially, Portugal was the hub, with goods and slaves traded through its capital Lisbon, with most slaves working in Portuguese cities
• There are over 27,000 documented slave voyages recorded in Europe. This figure does not include voyages initiated in the other countries. The conditions on board the ships (branding, living in human waste and vomit, perpetual darkness, poor nutrition, lack of ventilation, stifling heat, the inability to stand or sit, beatings, rapes, depression and hopelessness) resulted in an approximate 30-50% mortality rate.
• The duration of the middle passage voyage depended upon many factors. Depending on conditions, a 17th-century slave ship typically took 30 to 90 days. by the mid-19th century, the journey could be made in 12-16 days.
• Slave Ship: The Brookes After the 1788 Regulation Act, the Brookes was allowed to carry 454 slaves, the approximate number shown in this illustration. However, in four earlier voyages (1781-86), she carried from 609 to 740 slaves. This illustration's most famous reproduction is in Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament (the space calculations that Clarkson reports are from a House of Commons report in 1789).
• Description of conditions on The Brookes "The Negroes are chained two by two, the right leg of one to the left leg of the other. They fill up the hold, the deck, the between decks, as well as the platforms specially built between the decks. The enslaved lay nude on planks, without being able to change their position, and so cramped that sometimes they have to lie on their side. The motion of the vessel chafes their bodies and the irons tear their legs . . . . when they are permitted to come on the top decks for a few moments, a long chain is passed through their irons so that they don't attack the ship's crew or throw themselves into the sea. But when bad weather forces the hatchways to be closed, then the suffering of the Blacks, deprived of air in the hold and the between decks, becomes horrible. The vapors issuing from their bodies seem to come out of a scorching furnace; many among them are brought half dead; or are entirely suffocated on the deck
1443
• On the west African Coasts and Islands, the going rate for slaves was one horse for 25-30 slaves, by 1500 price of slaves rose to match the increased demand, one horse traded for 6 to 8 slaves
1444
• de Freitas lands 235 kidnapped and enslaved Africans in Lagos, and brings them to Europe
1445
• Prince Henry of Portugal established a slave market and fort in Arguin Bay Africa, and they were brought back to Portugal. When a large slave auction was held in Lagos in that same year it was described by one witness as a "terrible scene of misery and disorder"
1452
• European overseas expansion in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries initially took two directions. The first was towards the African west coast where raiding and trading expeditions for products like slaves, ivory, pepper and gold became the main money making endeavors. The second area of expansion was towards the Atlantic Islands (off the Northwest African coast: the Canaries, Madeira, Sao Tome and other islands). Here, where Europeans searched for valuable minerals and collected wild products like honey and timber. Eventually they cultivated products which lead to sugar production. Sugar was immensely profitable to produce but required a large labour force for production. For these two reasons, the sugar and slave trade became intimately entwined as the 'Sugar-Slave Complex' begins.
• Pope Nicholas V issues Dum Diversas, authorizing the Portuguese to reduce any non-Christians to the status of slaves
1454
• Pope Nicholas V issues Romanus Pontifex, granting the Portuguese a perpetual monopoly in trade with Africa
1455
• Starting in this year, at least 800 Africans were transported to Portugal annually
1462
• The Portuguese colony on the Cape Verde Islands is founded, an important way-station in the slave trade
1470
• Spanish merchants begin to trade in large numbers of slaves
1476
• Carlos de Valera of Castille in Spain brings back 400 slaves from Africa
1481
• A Portuguese embassy to the court of King Edward IV of England concludes with the English government agreeing not to enter the slave trade, against the wishes of many English traders
• Elmina Trading Post: Portuguese sailors gained permission from a local African leader to build a trading outpost and storehouse on Africa's Guinea coast to trade ivory, spices and gold thus the name Elmina, which means "the mine". Soon the major trade became humans. Africans were either captured in warring raids or kidnapped and taken to the port by African slave traders where they were exchanged for iron, guns, gunpowder, mirrors, knives, cloth, and beads brought by boat from Europe
1482
• Diogo Cao discovers the Congo river. The region is later a major source of slaves
1486
• Portuguese settle the West African island of Sao Tome. This uninhabited West African island is planted with sugar and populated by African slaves by the Portuguese
1492
• Pedro Alonso Nino, a Black navigator, guides Columbus to an unknown island he named San Salvador in the "New World"
• With the arrival of Columbus, European Imperialism and Colonialism officially begins
• African Slaves and servants play during off hours, these sessions over the next 400 years will develop into many American music styles including Jazz and the Blues
1493
• Queen Isabel of Spain declared that all indigenous peoples in the lands Columbus had discovered were to be considered her subjects. This saved Native Americans from slavery.
• On his second voyage, Columbus initiates the first transatlantic slave voyage, a shipment of several hundred Taino people sent from Hispaniola to Spain
• Columbus founds the first European colony in the New World: La Isabela in the Dominican Republic
1496
• Columbus returns, carrying around 30 Native Americans who were in effect, at his complete disposal, albeit not considered "slaves"
1497
• John Cabot, an Italian sponsored by King Henry VII of England, makes landfall on the northern tip of the island of Newfoundland
1499
• More than 200 slaves taken from the northern coast of South America by Amerigo Vespucci and Alonso de Hojeda and sold in Cardiz
1500
• Black plantation slavery begins in the New World when Spaniards begin importing slaves from Africa to replace Indians who died from harsh working conditions and exposure to disease
• almost 200,000 Africans had been transported to Europe and islands in the Atlantic
1502
• By 1502, runaway Africans had joined native communities in Haiti. Later in this century, Brazilian Amerindians captured a Portuguese slave ship and helped the Africans escape. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the percentage of Afro-Native Americans is projected to be much higher than in the United States. Since the earliest days of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, Africans have merged with indigenous peoples in South and Central America.
• Juan de Cordoba of Seville becomes the first merchant to send an African slave to the New World. Cordoba, like other merchants, is permitted by the Spanish authorities to send only one slave. Others send two or three
1504
• A small group of Africans - probably slaves captured from a Portuguese vessel - are brought to the court of King James IV of Scotland
1509
• Columbus's son, Diego Colon, becomes governor of the new Spanish empire in the Carribean. He soon complains that Native American slaves do not work hard enough
1510
• The start of the systematic transportation of African slaves to the New World: King Ferdinand of Spain authorises a shipment of 50 African slaves to be sent to Santo Domingo
1513
• Juan Ponce de Leon becomes the first European to reach the coast of what is now the United States of America (modern Florida)
• Vasco Nunez de Balboa takes thirty Africans on his trip to the Pacific Ocean
1516
• The governor of Cuba, Diego Velazquez, authorises slave-raiding expeditions to Central America. One group of slaves aboard a Spanish caravel rebel and kill the Spanish crew before sailing home - the first successful slave rebellion recorded in the New World
1517
• Bishop de Las Casas petitions Spain to allow the importation of 12 enslaved Africans for each household immigrating to America's Spanish colonies. De Las Casas later regrets this plea, and becomes a strong opponent of slavery
1518
• In a significant escalation of the slave trade, Charles V grants his Flemish courtier Lorenzo de Gorrevod permission to import 4000 African slaves into New Spain. From this point onwards thousands of slaves are sent to the New World each year
1519
• The circumnavigation expedition of Ferdinand Magellan sets out from San Lucar de Barameda
1521
• With the capture of King Cuahutemotzin by Hernan Cortes and the fall of the city of Mexico, the Aztec empire is overthrown and Mexico comes under Spanish Rule
1522
• A major slave rebellion breaks out on the island of Hispaniola. This is the first significant uprising of African slaves. After this, slave resistance becomes widespread and uprisings common
1524
• 300 African slaves taken to Cuba to work in the gold mines
1526
• Spanish colonists led by Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon build the community of San Miguel de Guadape in what is now Georgia. They bring along enslaved Africans, considered to be the first in the present-day United States. These Africans flee the colony, however, and make their homes with local Indians as the first nonnative settlers of what will become the United States
1527
• Earliest records of sugar production in Jamaica. Sugar production is rapidly expanding throughout the Caribbean with the mills almost exclusivly worked by African slaves
1528
• A slave called Esteban (or Estevanico) becomes the first African slave to step foot on what is now the United States of America. He was one of only four survivors of Ponfilo de Narvarez's failed expedition to Florida. He and the other three took eight years to walk to the Spanish colony in Mexico after first crossing through what is now Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Mexico. After their return in 1536, the group's leader, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, published an account of their journey through modern Texas and Mexico
1530
• Juan de la Barrera, a Seville merchant, begins transporting slaves directly from Africa to the New World (before this, slaves had normally passed through Europe first). His lead is quickly followed by other slave traders
1532
• Francisco Pizaro massacres the Incas at Caxamalca and captures King Atahuallpa, an event that marks the Spanish conquest of Peru
1539
• Hernando de Soto, following reports from Cabeza de Vaca, lands on the coast of Florida. Of about 1200 men in his expedition, around 50 were African slaves. After exploring modern Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina, the expedition ended in disaster
• 12,000 slaves were sold in the Lisbon markets. This differed from other European countries' experience of the trade which developed much more in their colonies
• Lisbon also thrived off the businesses associated with slavery, with Portuguese goods exchanged for slaves, goods traded for slaves and goods produced by the slaves. People invested in the trade, and profited, and the Royal family took its share through taxation. African slaves were employed in a variety of occupations but increasingly they were to be found in urban employment such as domestic service.
1541
• On his third voyage to Canada, Jacques Cartier establishes the first French colony in the New World at Charlesbourg-Royal, close to modern Quebec
1550
• by 1550 there were 32,000 African slaves in Portugal, with the majority owned by the aristocracy, officials and religious institutions. However the number of slaves declined after demand for them in the Portuguese colony of Brazil led to an increase in prices, and gradually Brazil's economic importance, fundamentally linked to slavery, overtook that of Portugal
• In Spanish Caribbean islands and Portuguese Brazil by the mid 1500s, colonists had turned to the cultivation of sugar. Sugar required constant attention and exhausting labor. They tried to recruit native Americans, but many died from diseases brought by Europeans, such as smallpox, diphtheria, and tuberculosis or fleeing to the countryside. European colonists then turned their attentions to Africa.
1555
• The Portuguese sailor Fernando de Oliveira, in Arte de Guerra no mar (The Art of War at Sea), denounces the slave trade as an 'evil trade'. The book anticipates many of the arguments made by abolitionists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
• A small group of Africans from Shama (modern Ghana) described as slaves are brought to London by John Lok, a London merchant hoping to break into the African trade
• A group of Norman and Breton sailors, under the command of Nicolas de Villegagnon, found the first French colony in South America. The settlement, close to modern Rio De Janiero in Brazil, is named La France Antarctique
• Earliest records of sugar production in Jamaica. Sugar production is rapidly expanding throughout the Caribbean with the mills almost exclusivly worked by African slaves
1562
• The Portuguese are the first to embark upon the slave trade, from 1646-1790 slavery grew exponentially. Most slaves during this period from the west coast of Africa (Sudan), other smaller nations involved initially were Benin, Dahomey and Ashanti. Many slaves were produced by African slave traders from slaves captured in wars. The main forms of barter with African groups were glass beads, whiskey, ivory and guns. The slaves became so valuable they became known as "Black Gold"
1564-1569
• Sir John Hawkins, the first English slave trader, makes four voyages to Sierra Leone, taking a total of 1200 Africans across the Atlantic to sell Spanish settlers on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola amd approximately 300 of them in Sierra Leone - for sale in the West Indies. Hawkins also introduced both the potato and tobacco to England
1565
• African farmers and artisans accompany Pedro Menendez de Aviles on the expedition that establishes the community of San Agustin (St. Augustine, Florida)
1569
• Sir John Hawkins sails into the port of Vera Cruz on the Mexican Coast, where the Spanish fleet was moored. The Spaniards, who were infuriated to discover that Hawkins (and the English) were participating in the north atlantic slave trade, defeated Hawkins and enslaved, slaughtered and burned the English at the stake. Only a handful of the 400 men who sailed with Drake and Hawkins escaped. The English refrained from the slave trade in the America's for the next 100 years
• A Sevillian Dominican, Tomas de Mercado, publishes Tratos y contratos de mercaderes (Practices and Contracts of Merchants), which attacks the way the slave trade is conducted
1571
• The Parlement of Bordeaux sets all slaves - "blacks and moors" - in the town free, declaring slavery illegal in France
1573
• A Spanish-Mexican lawyer, Bartolemo Frieas de Albornoz, publishes Arte de los contratos (The Art of Contracts), which casts doubt on the legality of the slave trade
1575
• Paulo Dias de Novaes founds the Portuguese colony of Sao Paulo de Luanda on the African mainland (modern Angola). The colony soon became a major slave-trading port supplying the vast Brazilian market
1577
• Sir Francis Drake sets out from Plymouth on his circumnavigation of the globe
1580
• Following the death of King Henry of Portugal, and a short campaign by the duke of Alva, Spain and Portugal are united under Philip II of Spain. Spain thus becomes the most important colonial power - and the largest participant in the slave trade
1585
• The first English colony in the New World is established in North Carolina by Sir Walter Raleigh. It was not successful, and the colonists withdrew in June 1586
1587
• A second English colony is founded again organised by Sir Walter Raleigh. When it is revisted by English ships in August 1590, it has vanished without trace
1595
• Philip II of Spain grants Pedro Gomes Reinal, a Portuguese merchant, a near monopoly in the slave trade. Reinal agrees to provide Spanish America with 4250 African slaves annually, with a further 1000 slaves being provided by other merchants
1598
• Isabel de Olvera a free mulatto, accompanies the Juan Guerra de Resa Expedition which colonizes what is now New Mexico
1600
• King Philip III of Spain outlaws the use of Native American slaves in Spanish colonies
• Records indicate there may have been as many as 900,000 enslaved Africans in Latin America.
1607
• Jamestown established by Virginia Company: attracts mostly young single men, indentured servants, poor, displaced from overcrowded English cities and enclosed farms
1612
• John Rolfe plants Caribbean tobacco seeds in the rich Virginia soil. Tobacco becomes the exported product that makes Virginia a wealthy colony
1619
• John Rolfe brings 20 African slaves to Jamestown to harvest tobacco along with indentured whites
1620
• The Pilgrims land at Plymouth Rock
1626
• Dutch West India Co. exports 11 male slaves to New York
1630
• Massachusetts enacts a law protecting enslaved Africans who flee owners because of ill treatment
1638
• Eight years after the original settlement of Boston, a ship named Desire arrived in Boston with the first African Slaves
• The price tag for an African male was around $27, while the salary of a European laborer was about seventy cents per day
1640
• An African servant, John Punch, and two servants of European descent are captured while attempting to run away. The European servants are required to serve additional time as part of their punishment. John Punch is sentenced to lifetime servitude. This is the first recorded case of slavery prescribed by law in the colony of Virginia
• Whipping and branding, borrowed from Roman practice via the Iberian-American colonies, appeared early and with vicious audacity. One Virginian slave, named Emanuel, was convicted of trying to escape in July, 1640, and was condemned to thirty stripes, with the letter "R" for "runaway" branded on his cheek and "work in a shackle one year or more as his master shall see cause"
• Beginning of large-scale introduction of African slave labor in the British Caribbean for sugar production
1641
• Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth were the first colonies to authorize slavery through legislation as part of the 1641 Body of Liberties. Over the next 20 years, other colonies would also institute their own regulations to restrict a slave's rights and behavior. Unlike traditional English law in which the father determined the status of a child, the colonies adopted the rule that a child's status was instead determined by its mother insuring that black children, even those with white ancestors, would remain slaves
1642
• Virginia passes a fugitive slave order penalizing those who assist runaway slaves, at the rate of 20 pounds of tabacco for each night of assistance
1646
• The first group munumission in North America: 11 blacks successfully petition the governement of New Amsterdam for their freedom
• Massachusetts Bay Colony declares two Africans free and orders their return to Africa at public expense
1650
• Betweem 1650 and 1900, historians estimate that at least 28 million Africans were forcibly removed from central and western Africa as slaves
1651
• Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, argued from a mechanistic theory that man is a selfishly individualistic animal at constant war with others. In the state of nature, life is "nasty, brutish, and short"
1652
• Quakers in Pennsylvania pass a resolution against lifetime indenture. Quakers would soon become more organized over the next hundred years to form the core of America's abolitionist movement, as they articulated strategy and philosophy and began social actions against slavery
1655
• England seizes Jamaica from Spain
1656
• Virginia prohibits Indian slavery
1660
• Slaves were mostly for sugar plantations, diamond mines in Brazil, house servants, on tobacco farms in Virginia, in gold mines in Hispaniola and later the cotton industry in the Southern States of the USA. "The hybridization of sugar cane between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century made increasingly large harvests possible." M.E. Descoutilz
1661
• Virginia: children born to enslaved mothers are considered slaves as well, regardless of their fathers' status. Children of enslaved fathers and free mothers are not considered slaves
1662
• Anthony Johnson, a tobacco farmer became the first free black man in North America. His mother was an African, and Johnson worked on a tobacco plantation where he met his wife Mary. Johnson eventually acquired five servants for himself, which at that time then qualified him to purchase a 200-acre land grant along the Puwgoteague River in Virginia. There, he founded the first independent African community in North America.
• It was conventional wisdom in the South that the best way to get a good house servant was to raise one. Often, children were taken from their parents to sleep in the Big House as well as to eat, work and play there. Their families were replaced by the families of their owners, with their position in those families clearly defined
The first known Virginia statute punishing interracial sexual relations was enacted in 1662
1663
• Gloucester County Virginia, slaves organize rebellion which is discovered. participants killed and heads displayed in the street
1664
• New York and New Jersey recognize legality of slavery
• Boston traders begin to import black slaves directly from Africa
• There had been a number of marriages between white women and slaves by 1664 when Maryland passed a law which made them and their mixed-race children slaves for life, noting that "divers freeborne English women forgettfull of their free Condicon and to the disgrace of our Nation doe intermarry with Negro Slaves"
1668
• Virginia enacts law denying legal equality to freed blacks
1672
• The Royal African Company is formed to regulate the English slave trade
• Runaway slaves resisting capture may be killed. Virginia passes a law putting a bounty on the heads of escaped Africans who formed communities in and around the Great Dismal Swamp bordering Virginia and North Carolina
1675
100,000 African slaves in the West Indies in Caribbean Sea, south of Florida; 5,000 in North America
1685
• New York law forbids black and Native American slaves from having meetings or carrying firearms
1688
• Germantown, PA, (The German Mennonite Revolution Against Slavery) Quakers sign first official written protest against slavery in Colonial North America
1692
• Virginia enacts a law making it legal to kill runaway slaves in the course of recapture
1693
• Philadelphia, PA, permits whites to "take up" and imprison any black found without a pass
1698
• The Royal African Company monopoly is ended. The slave trade is opened to private traders