“The most important thing to focus on is to acknowledge that this is the age of empire,” said West, who referred to 17th century Britain as a “third-rate” world power that was trying to catch up with the Spanish empire. “Spain had already colonized much of the New World,” West noted.

“It is important to understand that English America was a corporation before it was a country,” he said.

As such, the English colonists tried many industries, including silk, wheat, glass, timber and cotton, but none of the exports proved profitable enough to sustain the colony. That changed in 1612, when colonist John Rolfe developed a smooth-tasting tobacco leaf that was easy to cultivate.

As the market for “New World” tobacco grew, the colonists began demanding more land from American Indians, leading to increased conflict between the groups. They also needed workers.

In 1620, pirates stole Angolan war captives from a Portuguese ship and brought about 20 of them to Jamestown. In order for the colony to survive, it needed the skills and the labor that these Africans — who hailed from a kingdom of farmers, craftsmen and cattle herders — brought with them.  

“The Africans arrived with skills,” said Dr. Darlene Clark Hine, a professor of African-American studies and history at Northwestern University. “These were not a bunch of hapless primitive people that Europeans had to train. They came over with tools and resources in hand.” 

African immigrants initially weren’t slaves for life. Some were free and some worked as indentured servants alongside the English indentured servants, planting and harvesting tobacco, raising cattle and trading produce to American Indian and European settlers, Berlin said.

During the early years of the settlement, many Black people were free, owned property and were full participants in society. Things changed, Berlin said, with the creation of a new institution — the plantation.

It took time for Africans to evolve into slaves, said panelists Hine and Dr. Farah J. Griffin, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. African labor became critical to the growth and management of the tobacco farms.

It was then that colonists instituted laws to maintain a continual supply of this labor force.

“It was not until much later that you get laws that made children the possession of their owners,” Griffin said.

“Any child born of a slave woman would be a slave for life because the child would inherit the status of the mother, and that was a departure from English law,” added Hine.

The development of lifelong slavery was driven by the economic interests of the British, who were eager to make a profit from New World tobacco.

In the 1640s, the colony saw the emergence of limitations on rights of people categorized as Negro, said Dr. Cassandra Newby-Alexander, a professor at Norfolk University. “It was a way to create a class system based first upon racial identification and then on economics. That is why Plymouth has been catapulted to the beginning of our nation and not Jamestown,” she said.

Such laws and restrictions then began to affect the motivation of Africans and their descendents, said Rex Ellis, vice president of the historic area at Colonial Williamsburg.  

“As we move through the period of time, it begins to affect our concept of work,” Ellis said. “We begin to think about work as something for others as opposed to something we do for ourselves. It is not the quality of the work, it is ‘how I can do less because it is the only way I can rebel,’” Ellis said. “Much of that legacy is still with us.” 

Panelists called on the development of new narratives to fully tell the story of America and acknowledgement of the key roles American Indians and Africans had in the country’s birth and its principles of democracy, free enterprise and representative government.

“We have to dispel the myth that during the transatlantic slave journey Africans lost their culture,” said Eddie Glaude, an associate professor of Religion and African Americans studies at Princeton University.

“We are all saying we want our stories told and that means we create a new story,” Hine said.