Children headed to class in white uniforms.
The city bustled with people, but few of them seemed in a hurry. Wash lines with colorful clothes hung from balconies. Then came peeling high-rises with rusty air conditioners. Low adobe huts blurred past, roofs held down by concrete blocks.
#Angola arc raiders windows#
Together, they gather exquisite details that bring the reader along as Tucker first encounters Africa from the windows of a van with a “cracked windshield and a broken door.” From the story: Berry and French stand to the side furiously noting each move and reaction in their notepads while videographer and photojournalist Jarrad Henderson builds a visual account. The story of Tucker’s search begins as she steps off a plane - “to a sky so gray it blended into the tarmac” - in the capital city of Luanda. The story achieves with an inspired structure that weaves Tucker’s emotional travels through Angola into a larger landscape, buttressed by historical accounts, of the shameful history of what happened to Africans torn from their homeland, pressed into slavery and transported, in horrific conditions, across the ocean to America. We hope it offered readers a different view of how that history can be told.” We also chose to tell it through the experience of an African American woman who believes she is a descendant. What sets the USA Today narrative apart, Berry believes, “is that we traveled to Angola where the ships came from to tell that unique story. The story joins a new canon of stories marking the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans to the colonies that would become the United States, perhaps most notably the “1619” package by the New York Times, anchored by a searing essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones. (During her reporting, Berry discovered that she and Tucker might share a bloodline.)
Her quest was chronicled in August in “ 1619: Searching for Answers: The long road home,” a heartwrenching narrative co-written by award-winning journalist Deborah Barfield Berry, a Washington reporter for the USA Today, and Kelley Benham French, an award-winning writer, editor and teacher who is a senior editor of narrative and special projects at the news organization. news organizations offered special coverage of the 400th anniversary of slavery’s American roots, Tucker got her chance.Īccompanied by a reporting team from USA Today, Tucker, 61, traveled to Angola in search of her ancestry. She grew up with that as her family’s origin story, and has long wanted to prove that they they are direct descendants of William, a legacy that is “a family treasure, handed down from generation to generation.” But not to Wanda Tucker, a scholar and administrator at Rio Salado College in Tempe, Arizona. The specifics of that history were unknown to most Americans over the years since, or changed so completely as to become a lie that some still believe. William Tucker at the start of chattel slavery that is this nation’s ugliest heritage. Six years later, a census showed the family as residing with a Capt. In its cramped hold, it carried 20 or so human beings kidnapped from an ancient kingdom in Africa by Portuguese slave traders who sold them to the colonists for supplies.Īmong the survivors of this voyage were Anthony and Isabella, who would become the parents of William, the first recorded named birth of an African in America. Wanda Tucker in Angola, on a trip to research her family's ancestryĭeborah Barfield Berry Four centuries ago this year, a privateer named the White Lion anchored off Point Comfort, an English colony in what is now Hampton, Virginia.
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