The Zebra Murders: Civil Rights, Racial Revolution, and San Francisco’s Season of Horror — Part 1

Originally published at https://aakash.substack.com. Subscribe there for the rest of the series!

On August 20th, 1619, twenty Angolans, kidnapped by Portuguese slave raiders in the Kingdom of the Kongo, were unloaded in Jamestown, the capital of the newly chartered crown colony of Virginia. These weren’t the first enslaved Africans in the Americas-the first shipment of slaves arrived in St. Augustine, Florida, almost sixty years earlier. They also technically weren’t slaves-as the institution of chattel slavery hadn’t yet been invented in British America, they were classified as indentured servants. And they had arrived in Virginia by pure chance. Originally on a ship bound for Veracruz, a raid by British privateers diverted a portion of the enslaved to the nascent Jamestown settlement instead.

The true poignancy of this day, instead, is derived in retrospect. 1619 marked the beginning of two-hundred and forty-six years of black bondage in the United States of America. Over this time, almost four-hundred thousand Africans were kidnapped and forced to undergo a harrowing journey to the United States. They were stripped of their names and languages. Their studded bangles were replaced with manacles, their headdresses with slave collars. Their only remaining…