The Foreign Service Journal, October 2021

14 OCTOBER 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Share your thoughts about this month’s issue. Submit letters to the editor: journal@afsa.org he died in New Mexico, a year before Coronado arrived. In 1564, France’s Fort Caroline in Florida had a free Black community, most escaped from the Span- ish. Some 1,565 Black people helped found St. Augustine, America’s oldest city. In 1606, the first African American baby on record was born there, to slaves Agustin and Francisca, and baptized. And there are more. Thus, Black people were here well before 1619 and doing heroic deeds. Even then, the project only mentions the ships’ arrival in Jamestown, but is silent on the amazing tale of how the enslaved persons got aboard and all they achieved in Jamestown. In 1619, two British and Dutch pri- vateers had intercepted a Spanish slave ship from Angola to Mexico. The ship, with only half the Africans still alive, was bound for Veracruz, where the slaves might survive a year or two in the mines. For the 60 Africans who disembarked at Jamestown, this was their lucky day. We know little of what became of them, but they likely didn’t stay enslaved. A March 1620 census records 15 African men and 17 women in James- town. Slavery wasn’t legally recognized there until 1661, and the 1619 Project should have said so. For example, one probable passen- ger, Antonio (a Spanish name), renamed himself Anthony Johnson, got married, had kids, owned a plantation, later bought African slaves and sued a white neighbor in court. Lastly, of note to the Foreign Service, Black indentured servants and free- men came from England to Virginia between 1620 and 1640. In the 1630s, one of them, John Punch, married a white woman, likely a fellow indentured servant, in America’s first interracial marriage. He likely prospered. One-sixth of marriages today cross racial or ethnic lines. Punch’s descendants include the State Department’s own Ralph Bunche (the first African American to win a Nobel Prize) and another Nobel honoree, Barack Obama (through his mother, Ann Dunham). n Bob Fretz FSO, retired Edmonds, Washington