JULY 24, 1651: ANTHONY JOHNSON AND THE NCM THEORY OF HISTORY

 Monday, July 24, 1651.dawned to the residents of this planet promising to be yet another normal day in their lives, as well as normal could be. Three centuries and 72 years later, Monday, July 24, 2023, dawned to the residents of this planet promising to be yet another normal day, as well as normal could be. Nevertheless, our normality on both dates was strangely altered by one Anthony Johnson.

But first, let’s examine what happened in 2023. Florida’s educational authorities had adopted new state standards for teaching slavery to their students in middle school. Vice President Harris then came to Florida to passionately decry those standards as being racist because of a single reference that slavery did have a minor positive role in teaching the slaves valuable skills even though all other slavery references in the standards cast the institution as horrific and inhumane. And then on Monday, the 24^th. the chorus of progressive media voices began damning the standards on the same key of outrage.

There are several ironies here. First, Harris probably did not read all the standards. Indeed, one of her political handlers essentially admitting the fact when he defended her by saying she was speaking from her heart, not from her head. Second, Harris in a debate preceding the 2016 presidential election passionately attacked the eventual winner for racist attitudes but gleefully accepted the candidacy for the number two office from the same man she had denounced in the debate, Third, most progressives and too many conservatives for that matter do not  have a sense of history. Or they or their advisors would have had known about Anthony Johnson. Thank goodness that the researchers for my “This Day in History” calendar knew about Johnson.

On Monday, July 24, 1651, Anthony Johnson became one of the first Black landowners in America, my calendar reported to me. So, 32 years after the first import of slaves to Virginia and hence to all the American colonies, a Black man could own property in a colony with slaves.  (So, another nail in the coffin of the false premise of the 1619 Project!) But Johnson’s story gets richer.

The records are sketchy but according to the calendar and a Wikipedia entry, Johnson was living in Portuguese Angola where he was captured by slavers and found his way to England where he learned English. He then became an indentured servant in the Virginia colony. Once his contract expired, Johnson was granted his freedom and was granted more than 200 acres of land. He and his wife Mary then had their own slaves (my emphasis). Eventually Johnson and his household moved to the Eastern Shore on Virginia’s portion of the Delmarva Peninsula and then on to Maryland to avoid the pressures of increased slave ownership and legal questions. The Johnson family tree becomes obscure at this point but some scholars speculate that descendants of Anthony and Mary migrated to Delaware and North Carolina.

Anthony Johnson and his life is but one reason why I ascribe to the NCM Theory of history- that history is nuanced, contradictory, and messy. And as such, I highly recommend to progressives and to conservatives alike to stop “weaponizing” history for their own narrow political agendas.  As my long passed mentor Edmund Burke famously stated, “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”