The Foreign Service Journal, October 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2021 13 A Project That Challenges Our Thinking John Fer’s “How the 1619 Project Can Help Public Diplomacy” (May F SJ ) shows how the project challenges our thinking and portrays Americans tack- ling our most painful issues. Henry Louis Gates Jr. says that only 4 percent (388,000) of the millions who left Africa in chains came to the U.S., yet we discuss slavery—which existed everywhere but Australia—more than anyone. Still, the 1619 Project lacks bal- ance, sources, footnotes or bibliography, so is not a history text. The project gets a lot wrong. It omits mention of the first Africans in America and their heroism. Angolan-born free- man Juan Garrido arrived in Santo Domingo in 1502. He fought for Spain in Cuba, Puerto Rico and Mexico and came (with Ponce De Leon) to Florida in 1513 and 1521, later even sailing the Pacific. The first Black enslaved persons in the future 13 colonies came not in 1619, but with the Spanish in 1526 to found San Miguel de Gualdape, in present-day South Carolina. They bravely started America’s first rebellion by enslaved per- sons. Despite their hard work, the settle- ment failed. To avoid a return to Santo Domingo, some may have escaped into the woods, perhaps forming the first free Black community in America. Another, an enslaved North Afri- can named Estevanico, went with the Narvaez expedition, which shipwrecked in 1527 on Florida’s west coast. Four hundred set off to walk or sail in small boats to Mexico; Estevanico often went on ahead, as he later related to Native Americans. Eight years later, just he and three Spaniards lived to see Mexico City. In 1539, the viceroy of New Spain sent Este- vanico to search for the Cities of Cibola;