On Saturday, October 13, thirty-two pilgrims traveled to Jamestown and walked the final three miles along the Virginia Capital Trail to Historic Jamestowne. There, Mark Summers of Preservation Virginia gave us a no-holds-barred history of the what the first enslaved Africans experienced, and what has been obscured in the "popular" telling of the history of Jamestown. After that, we traveled to Fort Monroe (Fort Comfort) where Dr. Cassandra Newby-Alexander presented the history of the fort, both as the landing site of the first ships carrying enslaved Africans to Virginia, and later as the "Freedom's Fortress" that provided sanctuary for escaping slaves during the Civil War. We ended our pilgrimage by re-reading the 360 names of the enslaved at Monticello, to connect the dots between Charlottesville and Jamestowne/Ft. Monroe.
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