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LAA5401539-THE NATION
HAMPTON, Va. — His
name was William.
He was born in 1624, five
years after his parents, An-
toney and Isabella, arrived
in this port city on a ship
with 18 other Africans — the
first slaves in the English
Colonies that would become
the United States.
William’s last name is
thought to be Tucker, after
the white Colonist who
bought his parents and
put them to work on his to-
bacco plantation not far
from here.
Based on what remains
of census records, William
Tucker was the first African
American born in the Colo-
nies. Nobody knows when he
died.
Carolita Jones Cope
thinks about him often.
On a recent afternoon,
the 60-year-old retired law-
yer stepped slowly through
the shadows of oak trees,
over beds of pine needles
and around the 136 graves of
her ancestors at the two-
acre Tucker family ceme-
tery, just eight miles from
where William’s parents
landed.
“I believe I am descended
from that little boy,” she
said. “And I hope he is buried
here.”
Most of the graves are un-
marked, a fact that both sus-
tains her belief and compli-
cates her efforts to prove
it. Despite the uncertainty,
the story has gained wide-
spread acceptance in the
area.
This month marks 400
years since the arrival of that
first slave ship, the White Li-
on, an English privateer car-
rying Africans captured by
Portuguese colonists in pre-
sent-day Angola.
The anniversary has re-
ceived widespread attention
in commemorations across
the country, elevating
awareness of 1619 as a critical
juncture in American his-
tory.
For Cope and many of her
relatives, the moment has
come to feel intensely per-
sonal.
Cope grew up sur-
rounded by reminders of the
history of black people in
America. Her grandfather,
who owned a dry-cleaning
shop in the city of Newport
News, would tell her how her
ancestors fought for free-
dom.
He would drive her by
Bluebird Gap Farm, a park
and petting zoo on land once
owned by another William
Tucker, the white Colonist
who bought the boy’s par-
ents. He said it was once the
family home.
Cope was 9 when the Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr. was
assassinated. She went to a
segregated elementary
school, and her seventh-
grade class was the first at
Jefferson Davis Middle
School to be integrated.
Kids threw rocks at her bus
the first day of school.
The cemetery — a short
drive from her childhood
home, up a grassy alley at 1
Sharon Court — was always
a part of her life.
Her family would gather
there for funerals and pray
over the graves of great-
grandparents and great-
aunts and -uncles.
Elders made little men-
tion of William those days.
But her mother, Carol
Tucker Jones, and her moth-
er’s cousin, Thelma
Williams, knew the stories
that had been passed down
through the generations.
They believed the boy
was in the graveyard.
On the 375th anniversary
of the White Lion’s landing,
Cope’s mother would
proudly don a green dress as
she stood on a replica ship
landing in Jamestown as her
cousin watched.
To the younger genera-
tion, the history was enter-
taining but shrugged off as a
hobby of little use.
“We were taught to focus
on the future, on the good;
not on the past, not on the
bad,” Cope said.
She went on to graduate
from Spelman College, a his-
torically black institution in
Atlanta, and then law school
at Temple University. She
moved to a Washington,
D.C., suburb to work for the
U.S. Department of Labor.
She married and had a
son, who grew up to become
a fashion designer and
moved to Brooklyn, N.Y.
Meanwhile, the family
cemetery went into disarray
as those who had long cared
for it began to wither.
Cope’s mother struggled
with dementia. Thelma died
in 2006 at 64. Vines, weeds
and litter took over the
graveyard.
Sometime around then,
somebody placed an etched
block of granite at the en-
trance. It says: “Tucker’sCemetery: First Black Fam-
ily.”
Then six years ago, the
Hampton mayor called out
the Tuckers in the local
newspaper, saying the
grounds were “deplorable”
and needed rescue.
The family hastily ar-
ranged cleanup and tried to
secure legal ownership of the
land. An 1896 deed said a
Tucker had joined five
friends to buy the land for
$100, but no modern-day re-
cords documented a living
owner.
In 2016, Cope joined seven
brothers and cousins to
form a nonprofit to take over
the cemetery.
They named it the
William Tucker 1624 Society.
On its website, it declares a
goal of “education of the
greater public about the first
Africans to arrive in Virgin-
ia.”
“We wanted to reconnect
to our past,” Cope said. “I
chose the name because
that is the oldest black per-
son that we know to have
been born here.”
It was also good for public
relations. They needed mon-
ey to maintain the burial
ground.
Not everybody was so in-
terested in the cause or
William. There are more
than 100 living Tucker family
members today on the fam-
ily tree. The society has 25
members who pay its annual
dues of $120.
“People have moved
away,” Cope said. “My son
has been to one funeral at
the cemetery, and didn’t go
there growing up.”
But those involved are
proud of the local recogni-
tion they have received for
their declared link to the
first African American.
A family photo was once
printed in a National Park
Service brochure about the
place where the White Lion
landed, the former Army
post of Ft. Monroe, then
called Port Comfort.
Last year, Virginia Gov.
Ralph Northam signed an
easement to protect the
burial ground from devel-
opment, and the family’s
nonprofit received a $100,
grant to clean it up. Most of
the grounds are now consid-
ered a historic preservation
site, closed off for new buri-
als.
Hampton elected offi-
cials joined family members
Friday at the cemetery,
where Cope took part in a li-
bation ceremony — a ritual
pouring of water on the
grounds — as she recog-
nized the “sacrifices, suffer-
ing and pain” of her ances-
tors. Two prominent black
politicians, state Lt. Gov.
Justin Fairfax and U.S. Rep.
Robert C. Scott (D-Va.), at-
tended.
Still, Cope and her rela-
tives acknowledge that they
cannot prove a connection
to William.
They paid for a radar
scan of the grounds and
found 107 unknown graves,
each now marked with an 18-
inch white wooden cross.
The oldest they point to with
certainty is that of Ester An-
derson, a distant relative
who died on Feb. 5, 1903.On paper, the family has
traced itself back to the early
19th century and Samuel
and Millie Tucker, two slaves
near Hampton who were
Cope’s great-great-great
grandparents.
What’s harder is going
back another 200 years.
“We know a lot about the
place the first Africans came
from and how they got here,”
said Beth Austin, the regis-
trar of the Hampton History
Museum, which has docu-
mented the 1619 landing.
“But we know so little about
them as people and what
happened to their families.”
Compared with their Eu-
ropean counterparts, Eng-
lish colonists didn’t keep
great records. There are vast
troves of deeds docu-
menting slave ownership in
the Colonies, but the major-
ity were created after a series
of court cases and laws be-
gan to formally legalize slav-
ery in the 1640s.
“No one over these last
400 years thought to save
this information about An-
toney and Isabella and their
first child,” said Vincent
Tucker, 57, Cope’s cousin
who runs a moving company
near Richmond. “Because
we weren’t considered. We
were traded for goods. We
were property.”
In their graveyard visits,
emails and phone calls, the
family debates how far to go
to prove their links.
Offers have come in to ex-
hume the bodies for study.
Some Tuckers entertained
the idea. Most rejected it.
For Cope’s brother, Wal-
ter Jones, it could be just a
matter of time before bones
are studied, even without a
dig.
“The things we know
now, like the unmarked
graves we found, we could
have not known 100 years
ago,” said Jones, 63, a retired
information technology spe-
cialist who lives in Newport
News. “Who knows what
[technology] is next?”
“It’s a sacred ground. We
can’t disturb it,” said anoth-
er brother, William Foley
Jones, 68, who recently
moved back to Virginia from
Detroit, where he led a non-
profit that helped under-
privileged racial minorities
get schooling and jobs.
Vincent Tucker has grap-
pled with whether proof
matters at all. “What is it
what we have to prove?” he
said. “We have oral history
from generation to genera-
tion.”
Cope said she would love
to have that certainty. She
keeps a handwritten family
tree in a folder of old family
photos, newspaper clips and
family reunion programs,
hoping one day that she can
fill in the dotted line between
1 619 and today.
But in her heart, she has
come to believe that it ulti-
mately doesn’t matter.
“What if we found out we
weren’t related to William?”
she said.
“It wouldn’t change that
my uncles, grand-uncles are
buried here. It wouldn’t
change that we were slaves.
It wouldn’t change that our
ancestors built this nation.
It wouldn’t stop our pride.”Reflections on slavery and a family’s past
For Virginians with a
declared link to first
African American, the
moment is personal.
By Jaweed Kaleem
VERRANDALL TUCKERat his family cemetery in Hampton, Va. The Tuckers claim lineage to the first African born in America, in 1624.Photographs byKevin ManningVINCENT TUCKER,with brother Verrandall,
traces the name of Mary E. Tucker, who died in 1856.