The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

The Black Atlantic

“The Black Atlantic” explores the global experiences that created the African-American people. Beginning a century before the first documented “20-and-odd” slaves came to Jamestown, Virginia, the episode portrays the earliest Africans, slave and free, who arrived on these shores. The transatlantic slave trade soon became a vast empire connecting three continents.

The Black Atlantic (1500-1800)

30s

The Black Atlantic explores the earliest Africans, both slave and free, who arrived in the New World. Through stories of individuals caught in the transatlantic slave trade, we trace the emergence of plantation slavery in the American South. The episode also looks at what that Era of Revolutions — American, French and Haitian — would mean for African Americans and for slavery in America.

Previews + Extras

  • Priscilla, a Slave: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Priscilla, a Slave

    S1 E1 - 1m 50s

    Priscilla was purchased at a slave auction in South Carolina by a rice planter, Elias Ball. She arrived on the Ball's rice plantation in 1756. In her time, South Carolina had more black slaves than it did white citizens. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. meets Edward Ball, the fifth great grandson of Elias, and tours the old plantation, discussing Priscilla and early slavery in the United States.

  • America's Earliest Africans: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    America's Earliest Africans

    S1 E1 - 1m 19s

    Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. discusses two of the earliest Africans to arrive in North America---free men who journeyed to this continent a century before the first Africans who arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. Both were explorers who found hope and opportunity in this new land. But things changed quickly for those who followed them.

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