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CHAPTER ONE

Struggles Against

Racism

Hampton, Virginia, is a bustling community with a popula-
tion of more than one hundred thousand people. Built on the
shores of the Chesapeake Bay, Hampton features all the ele-
ments of a typical small American city: shopping malls, indus-
trial parks, and housing developments fi ll the landscape. Each
summer, baseball fans head over to Hampton’s War Memo-
rial Stadium, home of the Peninsula Pilots, a minor league
team that has sent several players into the Major Leagues.
Among those players is Ryan Zimmerman, who played fi rst
base for the Washington Nationals during the team’s World
Series–winning season of 2019.
Long before Zimmerman was fi elding ground balls for the
Peninsula Pilots, Hampton was known for a much sadder
chapter of American history. Four centuries ago, Hampton
was known as Point-Comfort. In 1607, colonists from Eng-
land landed in Virginia to establish the fi rst American colony
in nearby Jamestown. In 1619, many of those colonists gath-
ered at Point-Comfort to greet the arrival of an English ship,
the White Lion. On board were some twenty young men and
women captured by slave traders in what was then known as
the Kingdom of Ndongo—today, the African nation of Angola.
The colonists were happy to accept the slaves—their la-
bor was needed in the farm fi elds that colonists had estab-
lished in Jamestown. In exchange for the slaves, the colonists

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