In many American history books, 1620 is singled out as an important date. That was the year when the Mayflower landed at Plymouth colony, bringing a shipload of Pilgrims who had left their homes and set sail for a new world hoping to find the religious freedom which had been denied them inEurope. Those same books seldom record an equally momentous event which occurred one year earlier: in 1619, a Dutch man-of-war arrived in Jamestown, bringing the first African slaves to the land which would become theUnited States. These two events prefigure a divisive split in our nation's history: between those who settled the land looking for freedom, gain, or adventure and those who were violently ripped from their own country and forced into bondage to suffer for another's dream.

In the decades immediately following 1619, there was little increase in the slave trade in the English colonies. The...