UNC Asheville Commemorates the 400th Anniversary of the Arrival of the First Enslaved Africans

UNC Asheville commemorated the 400th anniversary year of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to the Jamestown settlement in what was then colonial Virginia with a series of special events from October 20-24, 2019, culminating in a keynote address by leading philosopher and scholar of African American studies, Molefi Kete Asante.

“Sunday was great with an educational and entertaining concert by the Department of Music, Monday morning was awesome with a standing room only Africana Studies presentation on the Cape Coast Castle dungeons and the darker side modernity, and the collaboration on Monday night between Africana Studies and Residential Education was provocative with the screening of the 1993 film, Sankofa, a story of slavery and of the African Diaspora from the perspective of the enslaved, challenging the romanticizing of slavery prevalent in American culture,” said Tiece Ruffin, interim director and associate professor of Africana studies, and coordinator of the commemoration events.

Programming also included an Afro music and dance performance; a traveling history exhibition, Black History 101 Mobile Museum, with Khalid el-Hakim; The People Not Property Project with UNC Greensboro Fellow for Digital Curation and Scholarship Brian Robinson, which focuses on North Carolina slave deeds and the digitization of materials for the Digital Library on American Slavery; along with a master class and faculty roundtable.

Asante’s keynote address included a performance by the University’s Afro Music & Dance Ensemble, an opening affirmation and blessing by emeriti faculty, Dolly and Dwight Mullen and Dee and Charles James, and an artistic dance by Mustapha Braimah, visiting assistant professor of dance.

“As a campus, our commemoration centered African people within a transgenerational and transcontinental world view. Self-determination and agency were essential and the culminating event included an eminent scholar, who is also a griot, story teller and oral historian,” Ruffin said. “I’m grateful that we highlighted the resistance and resilience of a people.”

The commemoration events are part of a nation-wide series of events, as U.S. Congress passed the 400 Years of African-American History Commission Act deeming 2019 as the year to carry out programs and activities throughout the United States to educate the public about the arrival of Africans in the English colonies, at Point Comfort Virginia, in 1619,  the impact of slavery and enforced racial discrimination, and to recognize and highlight the resilience and contributions of African-Americans since 1619.