The Unhidden Minute

At end of August in the year 1619, an English privateer ship call the White Lion reached Point Comfort on the Virginia peninsula. There, Governor George Yeardley and his head of trade bought 20 captives from Africa and remanded them into slavery.

The history of Black people had already begun in New World, but this event marks the beginning of the trans-Atlantic slave trade conducted by subjects of the British Crown. It is these original colonists, including many Black Americans, who would fight a Revolutionary War more than a century and a half later. Renamed in later years as Fort Monroe this was also the site of the Contraband Decision of 1861 during the Civil War at which three escaped slaves turned themselves over to the Union Army and began a legal argument that would result in the emancipation proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. One hundred and forty nine years after that, Fort Monroe would become the first National Monument designed by the first Black U.S. President Barack Obama in 2012.

https://www.nps.gov/fomr/index.htm

The Joy Trip Project celebrates the enduring legacy of American History. The Unhidden Minute is part of the Unhidden Podcast Project supported through a National Geographic Explorer Grant from the National Geographic Society, with the cooperation of the National Park Service. This series elevates the untold stories of Black American historical figures, events and cultural contributions.

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Become a paid subscriber to the Unhidden Minute Podcast for one year and receive a copy The Adventure Gap: Changing the Face of the Outdoors 10th Anniversary Edition by James Edward Mills.

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Captain Francisco Menéndez was a free black military leader serving the Spanish Crown in the 18th-century at St. Augustine, Florida. Born in 1709 he was one of the many enslaved people from the colony of South Carolina that escaped to Spanish Florida looking for freedom since 1687. Menéndez served as a captain in the Black militia of Florida, a military body created by Black citizens and the formerly enslaved of Carolina to help protect the region against outside incursions by the French and British. He was the leader of the garrison established in 1738 at Fort Mose, the first all-Black community in North America that is now a national historic landmark. Menéndez and his militia were vital to the defense of Castillo De San Marcos, a Spanish Fort that is today a monument managed by the National Park Service. The example of his courage and dedication to the cause of freedom has inspired the movement of Black liberation now for three centuries.

https://www.nps.gov/casa/index.htm

The Unhidden Minute is part of the Unhidden Podcast Project supported through a National Geographic Explorer Grant from the National Geographic Society, with the cooperation of the National Park Service. This series celebrates the untold stories of Black American history.

#unhiddenblackhistory #NationalParkService #yourparkstory #NationalGeographic #unhiddenminute

Juan Garrido was an African conquistador, born in the Kingdom of Kongo in 1487.  As a young man he went to Portugal  and converted to Catholicism. He chose the Spanish name, Juan Garrido or "Handsome John". Garrido joined a Spanish expedition and arrived in Santo Domingo (Hispaniola) in about 1502. He participated in the invasion of present-day Puerto Rico and Cuba in 1508. In 1513, as part of Juan Ponce de Leon entourage in search of gold, the expedition landed in Florida near what is now Dry Tortugas National Park. Garrido is the first known African to arrive on the North American Continent. By 1519, he had joined Cortes' forces and invaded present-day Mexico, participating in the siege of Tenochtitlan. He married and settled in Mexico City, where he was the first known farmer to have sown wheat in America.

The Unhidden Minute is part of the Unhidden Podcast Project supported through a National Geographic Explorer Grant from the National Geographic Society, with the cooperation of the National Park Service. This series celebrates the untold stories of Black American history.

Become a paid subscriber to the Unhidden Minute Podcast for one year and receive a copy The Adventure Gap: Changing the Face of the Outdoors 10th Anniversary Edition by James Edward Mills.

Pedro Alanso Niño born 1455 was a Spanish explorer of African descent. He was the pilot of the Nina, one of the three ships on the first Christopher Columbus voyage to the Americas in 1492. Niño also called by some El Negro, was born in Mugar, Spain his mother was an unidentified African woman and why Niño a Spanish sailor was his father. In his formative years Pedro Alonso Nino traveled and explored along the West Coast of Africa. He joined Christopher Columbus on his third journey during which he landed in Trinidad at the mouth of the Orinoco River. Through the earliest days of colonization, Black explorers ventured around the world on expeditions throughout much of what is now known as North and South America. The National Park Service marks the landing of the first Columbus voyage at Salt River Bay in the National Historic park and ecological preserve of the Virgin Islands