Welcome to Still Reckoning, a weekly round-up of my reflections at the intersection of race, faith, history and current events. Sometimes these reflections will feel more complete than others and I think that’s okay because we’re all still reckoning.
In the late summer of 1619, “20 and add Negroes” were brought ashore and sold on the land that we now know as the United States of America.
This moment, as Nikole Hannah-Jones and a host of scholars and journalists conclude, is central to the American story and deserves a greater place alongside years like 1776. Their groundbreaking work has sparked debate, motivated oppositional legislation and shaped the American conversation on history for nearly three years.
I would argue, similarly, that there are other note-worthy years deserving of renewed interest and attention as we seek to reckon with the history of racism in this country. In this very first entry: the year is 1663.
Allow me set the scene: It’s a warm summer evening; September 1, 1663. Nine indentured servants — white men — are meeting in secret at a small house near Cooks Quarter in Gloucester County, VA. They hatch a plan, appoint leaders, and agree to meet again at midnight the following Sunday, September 6, at a place called Poplar Spring. In the meantime, their assignments were to steal as many weapons as they could from their wealthy masters, in the hope that they could eventually arm a small band of thirty men — many of whom were believed to be enslaved Africans and Native Americans. As history recalls, from Poplar Spring the group planned to march together, seizing more arms and a much-needed drum to rally would-be fellow insurrectionists. Their goal was simple: march to the Governor’s mansion and demand their emancipation, together.
Said more simply, less than 50 years after the events of 1619, a multi-racial group of poor white, Black and Native people looked around at their collective conditions and realized that they shared a common interest. That it was in their collective good to join forces and advocate for a freedom that would benefit them all.
Sadly, however, their plot failed. A servant named Birkenhead revealed their plans to the governor, who arranged for the conspirators to be ambushed at their meeting place. The organizers would go on to be executed, the day that their plot was foiled would be enshrined as a “holy day” and the colony would never be the same.
Over the next few years, cross-racial uprisings would become increasingly popular, and the colonies would enact stricter and more explicit laws that further encoded racial caste into the social structures of America — driving poor white laborers from any allegiances with the legally despised enslaved African.
The Gloucester County Conspirators of 1663 realized the thing that white supremacy propagandist then and now never wanted for working class white people to understand: the social and economic interests of most white people are far more aligned with oppressed Black, indigenous and brown people than they are with the wealthy. White supremacy (and all of its declensions) is just a tool to trick white people into economic submission to the interests of the elite.
This “Strategic Racism,” as Professor Ian Haney Lopez calls is, has kept poor and working class people divided for nearly 400 years and shows few weaknesses as a narrative strategy, sadly.
As the national conversation on race and racism have become all but ubiquitous, the year 1663 (and others like it) have only received passing attention. Yet, these early cross-racial solidarity events are home to what I believe to be some of the most significant keys to unlocking the harmonious racially integrated future we deserve.
These events deserve our collective attention, if for no other reason, because they cradle moments that still cut through nearly 400 years of racial noise. 1663 is no 1619, but it is an American origin story that longs to be retold: the dispossessed, enslaved, poor and marginalized joined an unlikely multi-racial coalition of Black, white, Native and otherwise to fight on behalf of themselves and each other, together.
How different things would be if we still believed that we were stronger together.