The Warmth

Africans In America

For this week’s response I watched the movie Africans in America- The terrible transformation. This film Africans in America enlightened me on a lot of things that I wasn’t aware was going on.

When I thought of the 1600’s I had the impression that every black was a slave and had no freedom whatsoever

In this filmed I leaned about a guy that went by the name of Anthony Johnson. Anthony Johnson was one of the servants who got lucky and actually lived through everything, because most of the African people were dying of famine or of diseases. Johnson was able to find a society that was just beginning.

In 1640 Anthony Johnson was no longer looked upon as a servant. He was a free man, a black man who had his own estates. Johnson had two hundred and fifty acres of land and had five servants; some of them being white. This was the first time I had ever heard about a black man during this period of time having white men working for him.

Where Johnson lived, he was one of the four hundred African American people in Virginia out of the nineteen thousand settlers. Around the placed Johnson was living, there were nearly twenty African American people who were free, and thirteen of those people owned their own homes and land. So this video gave me knowledge on the first Africans in America that I was unaware of.

Other things I learned in this movie dealt with how Africans actually got here. In 1619 there was a mystery ship that appeared on the coast of Virginia. On the ship were hundreds of Africans that were stolen from another ship during a storm. This ship of Africans was sold to the Americans for food. The correlates back to the notes we’ve been taken in class on how slaves were traded for goods.

In 1645 in virgina, it was segregation

In America it seemed like all men would be equal and free

In 1607 vessels landed in Jamestown in vif=rginia.. with the hopes to establish the first English settlement

This would be a free land built by...