Black America’s Neglected Origin Stories
The history of Blackness on this continent is longer and more varied than the version I was taught in school.
![Illustration: An artist's rendering of Estebanico](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/-FdRn6PRILKLCFzDHtttkrbRSZo=/438x0:1563x1125/80x80/media/img/2021/04/WEL_Gordon_Reed_Origin_Estebanico2/original.jpg)
The history of Blackness on this continent is longer and more varied than the version I was taught in school.
The University of Virginia was supposed to transform a slave-owning generation, but it failed.
The pervasiveness of white-supremacist ideology in academia gave license to Jim Crow efforts for decades after the Civil War.