What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White
What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White
Know Anyone Who Thinks Racial Profiling Is Exaggerated? Watch This, And Tell Me When Your Jaw Drops.
This video clearly demonstrates how racist America is as a country and how far we have to go to become a country that is civilized and actually values equal justice. We must not rest until this goal is achieved. I do not want my great grandchildren to live in a country like we have today. I wish for them to live in a country where differences of race and culture are not ignored but valued as a part of what makes America great.
"In 1807, a wealthy 37-year-old scholar was captured in West Africa, in what is now Senegal, and transported to the United States to be sold into slavery.
That man, Omar Ibn Said, lived the remainder of his life enslaved in the American South, and his story might have been forgotten if not for the handwritten autobiography he left behind.
Written in Arabic and recently acquired by the Library of Congress, "The Life of Omar Ibn Said” is not only a rare handwritten personal story of an American slave, but it's also one of the first intimate accounts of the early history of Muslims in the United States.
Enslaved African Omar Ibn Said's autobiography, handwritten in Arabic, is now part of the Library of Congress collection.Enslaved African Omar Ibn Said's autobiography, handwritten in Arabic, is now part of the Library of Congress collection.
Ibn Said was among the approximately one-third of American slaves who were Muslim. While the exact number of enslaved Muslims is unknown, up to 40 percent of those who were captured and enslaved came from predominantly Muslim parts of West Africa.
“It challenges this notion of this being a Christian nation," says Zaheer Ali, an oral historian at the Brooklyn Historical Society and project director of the Muslims in Brooklyn project. "It opens us up to understanding that there were non-Christians present at the founding of this nation, and not only at the founding of this nation, but that helped build this nation...It challenges the idea that this was a quote ‘Christian nation’ from the beginning.”
America's first Muslims were slaves
The subsequent erasure of the black Muslim identity among the enslaved people in the United States was part of a strategy to strip enslaved Africans of their individual identities and reduce them to chattel both legally and in the public imagination.
"The black classification was devised to mark enslaved Africans as property. So, if you were black, you were no longer a human being," says Khaled Beydoun, an author and law professor at the University of Arkansas. "If you acknowledge some of these religious identities, then you're in turn acknowledging their humanity."
Muslim Yarrow Mamout (Muhammad Yaro)Muslim Yarrow Mamout (Muhammad Yaro) managed to buy his freedom after 44 years of enslavement. As an entrepreneur and homeowner, he continued to practice his faith. (1819 portrait Philadelphia Museum of Art)
During the antebellum period in the South, the Muslim identity took on very different identity from the stereotype of an African slave.
"When people thought of a Muslim at that time, they thought Arab, they thought Ottoman, they thought Middle Eastern," Beydoun says. "Enslaved Africans did not fit within that racial ethnic caricature or form."
This narrow understanding of both Muslims and Africans led to the widespread belief that the two identities could not overlap and helped hasten the erasure of Muslim African slaves from the historical record. In addition, the names of enslaved Muslims were often anglicized, which further obscured them from the history.
Writing themselves into history
Enslaved Muslims who left behind a written record challenged the idea that enslaved men and women were a brute workforce solely capable of physical labor because they lacked the intellectual capacity that would make them deserving of independence and freedom.
“These were people who were essentially writing themselves into existence both in terms of leaving a record of their life but also in terms of challenging the racist assumptions about people of African descent," Ali says.
What we know about the masses of African Muslim slaves who left no written record can be garnered from the remembrances of their descendants and their names on bills of sale or runaway notices.
Rather than writing Biblical verses as their captors thought, some enslaved Muslims wrote Koranic verses that condemned slavery.Rather than writing Biblical verses as their captors thought, some enslaved Muslims wrote Koranic verses that condemned slavery. (Courtesy National Museum of African American History/State Archives of North Carolina )
How long they adhered to Islam is unknown. Some converted to Christianity while others pretended to convert in order to satisfy their captors. But there are signs that some enslaved Muslims held onto the religion of their homelands.
Ali points to burial grounds on islands off the southern state of Georgia, where slave tombstones bear Islamic markings, and churches that were built facing the east, the direction Muslims face while praying. And there are descendants who recall seeing their elders using prayer rugs and Islamic prayer beads.
These recollections suggest that despite any coercion, some enslaved Muslims held onto their religious practices for life.
Leaving their mark
While the existence of a sizable number of African Muslim slaves might not be well known to most Americans, they are believed to have left their mark on American culture.
Author and scholar Sylviane Diouf has suggested that slave work songs are related to the vocal pattern of Koranic recitation and the call to prayer. Those work songs — such as "Levee Camp Holler" a century-old song that originated in Mississippi — eventually gave birth to the blues.
And Ali says it's possible that the banjo and guitar came from a traditional West African instrument.
Perhaps the most lasting legacy of Muslim slaves is the modern movement among some African Americans to embrace what they believe to be the original religion of their people.
“The movement towards Islam in the African American community in the 20th century was in part understood by its adherents as a reclaiming of a lost heritage, that this was not a new religion," Ali says. "Islam is not new to the United States; it was here before the country was founded; it was present among the people who helped build this country; and it has very much been a part of the thread of America’s story.”
Beginning with the period of American slavery until today, black Muslims continue to comprise the largest segment of the Muslim community in the United States."
First slave ship to reach America was called ‘The Good Ship Jesus’
by Staff writer
‘The Good Ship Jesus’ was a 700-ton ship purchased by King Henry VIII from the Hanseatic League, a merchant alliance between the cities of Hamburg and Lubeck in Germany. Twenty years after its purchase, the ship, in disrepair, was lent to Sir John Hawkins by Queen Elizabeth.
Hawkins, a cousin of Sir Francis Drake, was granted permission from Queen Elizabeth for his first voyage in 1562.
He was allowed to carry Africans to the Americas “with their own free consent” and he agreed to this condition.
Hawkins had a reputation for being a religious man who required his crew to “serve God daily” and to love one another.
Sir Francis Drake accompanied Hawkins on this voyage and subsequent others. Drake, was himself, devoutly religious.
Services were held on board the ship twice a day.
The Good Ship Jesus became involved in the Atlantic slave trade under John Hawkins, who organized four voyages to West Africa and the West Indies between 1562 and 1568.
Off the coast of Africa, near Sierra Leone, Hawkins captured 300-500 slaves, mostly by plundering Portuguese ships, but also through violence and subterfuge promising Africans free land and riches in the new world.
He sold most of the slaves in what is now known as the Dominican Republic.
He returned home with a profit and ships laden with ivory, hides, and sugar.
And thus began the slave trade!
During the last voyage, Jesus, along with several other English ships, encountered a Spanish fleet off San Juan de Ulúa (modern day Vera Cruz, Mexico) in September 1568.
In the resulting battle, Jesus was captured by Spanish forces.
The heavily damaged ship was later sold for 601 ducats to a local merchant.
George Washington’s 1795 Thanksgiving celebrated liberty. But the chef behind the feast had none.
“On the third Thursday of February 1795, President George Washington proclaimed a day of national thanksgiving to thank God “for the Constitutions of Government which unite and by their union establish liberty.”
The second such proclamation by Washington, it called for a religious rather than a feasting holiday, and that day’s menu is unknown. As a regular night for the Congress dinners hosted by the president, it would have been presided over by Washington’s cook, Hercules Posey — a chef so notable that he was famous in his own time. Yet, the liberty Washington extolled was not something Posey enjoyed: He was enslaved.
Posey came to Washington about 1770 as forfeited property used to secure a debt owed Washington by his profligate friend and neighbor John Posey. Listed as a “ferryman” managing a cross-Potomac boat service owned by his former owner, Posey was probably about 16 when he came to Mount Vernon, Washington’s Virginia estate, which included five farms. The most famous was Mansion House Farm, known today simply as Mount Vernon. More than 300 captive people labored there as both skilled and unskilled workers. Most were owned by the estate of Martha Washington’s first husband, Daniel Parke Custis, who had died two years before she married Washington. By the time of his own death in 1799, Washington personally owned just over 50 human beings.
As president, Washington moved to New York City, then the federal capital, bringing a small contingent of enslaved people as household and livery staff. When the capital moved to Philadelphia, Washington, unsatisfied with hired cooks, added Posey to the group.
Known until 2018 only as Hercules, or as “Uncle Harkless” — a diminishing nickname that surely rankled — Posey would have directed the meal that was served on that Thanksgiving holiday.
Working in the kitchen of a fine household — much less a presidential one — would not have been easy. Meals were elaborate, multicourse affairs with an astounding variety of local and imported foods. As described by Rep. Theophilus Bradbury (Federalist-Mass.) in 1795, the average Thursday Congress dinner would have put any modern Thanksgiving feast to shame, featuring “an elegant variety of roast beef, veal, turkeys, ducks, fowls, hams, & puddings, jellies, oranges, apples, nuts, and almonds, figs, raisins, and a variety of wines and punch.”
Producing these meals meant a 12-to-16-hour workday with a variety of cooks and assistants working under Posey. Remarkably, the Washington household accounts tell us that these staff members would have been hired and White indentured laborers — all taking orders from an enslaved Black man.
And yet no one dared step out of line. In his biography of Washington, the president’s step-grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, called Posey an “artiste” who ran his kitchen with “iron discipline,” quick to punish those who disobeyed.
In the nearly three pages devoted to Posey, Custis described his carriage, skill, exacting demeanor and love of fine clothes, comparing him to a “veriest dandy.” While preparing the Congress dinners, Posey “shone in an all his splendor,” Custis wrote, and “his underlings flew in all directions to execute his orders.”
These dinners set the standard for presidential and diplomatic dining in the early republic. Washington was unconcerned with fancy foods yet fastidious about the niceties of the table, and Posey had the daunting task of presenting meals that featured the bountiful yet humble American fare the first president favored, as well as elegant preparations that spoke to his status. It was not uncommon for a Virginia ham to be featured alongside elaborate continental meat pastries. This showcasing of classical culinary skill and American bounty became the prototype for diplomatic dinners and executive functions thereafter.
Washington also had little patience for chit chat. Meals with “the General,” as he was commonly called, were strained affairs — all the more reason for the food to be exquisite enough to maintain diners’ focus.
Posey’s approach to commanding his kitchen set the stage for the American celebrity chef whose artistry was considered necessary in the most powerful American homes. As president, Thomas Jefferson was adamant that French-trained chef James Hemings, a man he had formerly enslaved, should be his cook. Hemings, who was by then free, declined.
Living between worlds
Posey, well-known in Philadelphia as “the General’s cook,” was allowed to come and go freely once his work was complete, and he returned at night. He also earned the equivalent of twice the average man’s annual wages selling kitchen slops with Washington’s permission, and some of this money was spent on a gold-headed cane. Washington also sent for Posey’s son, Richmond — not because the young man demonstrated any culinary ability but because his father wished it.
Once, when a prominent guest arrived late to dinner, Washington began the meal, although social norms would have dictated he wait, telling his guest, “My cook never asks whether the company has arrived, but whether the hour has come.”
Yet Posey lived in a netherworld between free and unfree. Washington kept him and the other enslaved members of the president’s house in bondage by circumventing the Pennsylvania abolition law that allowed them to petition for freedom if they remained in the state more than six months. The Washingtons regularly rotated people back to Virginia or, in a pinch, over the border to New Jersey — a slave state — to reset their time in the capital before six months were up. The only one allowed to overstay this time was Posey.
As a chef and a man, Posey honed his bold self-possession, despite being born into chattel slavery in Virginia. It’s likely he was strongly influenced by living in Philadelphia, where more than 90 percent of African Americans were free. Although captive in the president’s house, he moved about an abolitionist city with a growing and influential Black community, including such men as Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, abolitionists and founders of the Free African Society.
Most of all, Philadelphia was the greatest food city in America, a bustling international port positioned ideally to receive foods and culinary influence from the North, the South and the West Indies. Posey experienced a world of food artisanship and culinary creativity largely advanced by people of color, including Charles Sang, a celebrated confectioner; Polly Haine, famed for her pepperpot stand in the public market; Benjamin Johnson, an oysterman; numerous cake sellers and bread bakers; and, for a time, Hemings, who lived across the street from the president’s house.
Why Posey didn’t escape into the world of free Black Philadelphia has puzzled scholars for decades. When he finally self-emancipated, it was from Mount Vernon, on the president’s 65th birthday in 1797. He was seen once more in 1801, after Washington had died and freed him and the others he owned in his will. When New York Mayor Richard Varick offered to apprehend Posey for Mrs. Washington, she declined, claiming she had “found a white cook who answers just as well.” The truth was that Posey was a free man three times over: having remained in Philadelphia more than six months; by virtue of Washington’s will; and by his own agency.
In New York, Posey’s skill as a chef allowed him to build a life in a thriving free Black community. He lived there, working as a cook, until his death in 1812.
Nothing is known of the meals Posey cooked as a free man, but even if there were, it would be his triumphs in the presidential kitchen for which he would be remembered, especially those accompanying Washington’s most sweeping proclamations, such as his 1795 day of thanksgiving.
More than 200 years later, we are trying to square the heroic myths of America’s founding with the truths about its creators, who enjoyed and profited from the enslavement of African Americans such as Posey, who cooked feasts praising the idea of liberty while his own hands were shackled. It would be a half-century after Posey’s death before President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation would change that equation for those like him. The same year, 1863, Thanksgiving became a regular national observance by Lincoln’s hand.
Ganeshram is executive director of the Westport Museum for History and Culture and author of a novel about Hercules Posey, “The General’s Cook.”
The justices issued six opinions, several of them unusually bitter, in upholding challenges from churches and synagogues to state pandemic restrictions on religious services.
WASHINGTON — A few minutes before midnight on Wednesday, the nation got its first glimpse of how profoundly President Trump had transformed the Supreme Court.
Just months ago, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was at the peak of his power, holding the controlling vote in closely divided cases and almost never finding himself in dissent. But the arrival of Justice Amy Coney Barrett late last month, which put a staunch conservative in the seat formerly held by the liberal mainstay, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, meant that it was only a matter of time before the chief justice’s leadership would be tested.
On Wednesday, Justice Barrett dealt the chief justice a body blow. She cast the decisive vote in a 5-to-4 ruling that rejected restrictions on religious services in New York imposed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to combat the coronavirus, shoving the chief justice into dissent with the court’s three remaining liberals. It was one of six opinions the court issued on Wednesday, spanning 33 pages and opening a window on a court in turmoil.
The ruling was at odds with earlier ones in cases from California and Nevada issued before Justice Ginsburg’s death in September. Those decisions upheld restrictions on church services by 5-to-4 votes, with Chief Justice Roberts in the majority. The New York decision said that Mr. Cuomo’s strict virus limits — capping attendance at religious services at 10 people in “red zones” where risk was highest, and at 25 in slightly less dangerous “orange zones” — violated the First Amendment’s protection of the free exercise of religion.
Wednesday’s ruling was almost certainly a taste of things to come. While Justice Ginsburg was alive, Chief Justice Roberts voted with the court’s four-member liberal wing in cases striking down a restrictive Louisiana abortion law, blocking a Trump administration initiative that would have rolled back protections for young immigrants known as Dreamers, refusing to allow a question on citizenship to be added to the census and saving the Affordable Care Act.
Had Justice Barrett rather than Justice Ginsburg been on the court when those cases were decided, the results might well have flipped. In coming cases, too, Justice Barrett will almost certainly play a decisive role. Her support for claims of religious freedom, a subject of questioning at her confirmation hearings and a theme in her appellate decisions, will almost certainly play a prominent role.
Democrats had feared, and Mr. Trump had predicted, that Justice Barrett’s vote might be crucial in a case arising from the presidential election. But there is no case on the court’s docket or on the horizon that has a realistic potential to alter the outcome.
It is not clear how Justice Barrett will vote in the latest challenge to the Affordable Care Act, which was argued this month. But, judging from the questioning, the act is quite likely to survive however she votes.
Chief Justice Roberts is fundamentally conservative, and his liberal votes have been rare. But they reinforced his frequent statements that the court is not a political body. The court’s new and solid conservative majority may send a different message.
That said, the court’s dynamics can be complicated, and not all decisions break along predictable lines. For instance, while Chief Justice Roberts has lost his place at the court’s ideological center, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who was the second of Mr. Trump’s three court appointments, values consensus and may turn out to be an occasional ally.
On Wednesday, Justice Kavanaugh issued a conciliatory concurring opinion emphasizing that he agreed with much of what Chief Justice Roberts had written in dissent.
“I part ways with the chief justice,” he wrote, “on a narrow procedural point.” That point — whether the court should act immediately, notwithstanding Mr. Cuomo’s decision to lift the challenged restrictions for the time being — was, however, enough to decide the case.
The majority opinion was unsigned, but Ross Guberman, an authority on legal writing and the author of “Point Taken: How to Write Like the World’s Best Judges,” said he suspected that its principal author was the newest justice.
“My money is on Justice Barrett,” Mr. Guberman said, pointing to word choices that echoed her opinions on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Among them, he said, was “the concession that justices ‘are not public health experts,’” and “the taste for ‘And,’ ‘But,’ and ‘show.’”
The unsigned opinion was mild and measured, which is also characteristic of Justice Barrett’s judicial work. It took issue with what it said were Mr. Cuomo’s unduly harsh restrictions, which had been challenged by, among others, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and two synagogues, the latter of which had argued that Mr. Cuomo had “singled out a particular religion for blame and retribution for an uptick in a societywide pandemic.”
The majority opinion said less restrictive measures would work.
“Among other things, the maximum attendance at a religious service could be tied to the size of the church or synagogue,” the opinion said. “It is hard to believe that admitting more than 10 people to a 1,000-seat church or 400-seat synagogue would create a more serious health risk than the many other activities that the state allows.”
The opinion said the state had treated secular businesses more favorably than houses of worship.
“The list of ‘essential’ businesses includes things such as acupuncture facilities, camp grounds, garages, as well as many whose services are not limited to those that can be regarded as essential, such as all plants manufacturing chemicals and microelectronics and all transportation facilities,” the opinion said.
The most notable signed opinion came from Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, Mr. Trump’s first appointee. His concurrence was bitter, slashing and triumphant, and it took aim at Chief Justice Roberts, whose concurring opinion in the California case in May had been relied on by courts around the nation to assess the constitutionality of restrictions prompted by the pandemic.
The chief justice’s basic point was that government officials, in consultation with scientific experts, were better positioned than judges to make determinations about public health. But Justice Gorsuch wrote that the opinion, in South Bay Pentecostal Church v. Newsom, was worthless.
“Even if the Constitution has taken a holiday during this pandemic, it cannot become a sabbatical,” he wrote. “Rather than apply a nonbinding and expired concurrence from South Bay, courts must resume applying the Free Exercise Clause. Today, a majority of the court makes this plain.”
“We may not shelter in place when the Constitution is under attack,” Justice Gorsuch wrote. “Things never go well when we do.”
Chief Justice Roberts responded, in a tone suggesting that his patience was being tested, that there was no need to act because Mr. Cuomo had, for the time being, lifted the restrictions.
“Numerical capacity limits of 10 and 25 people, depending on the applicable zone, do seem unduly restrictive,” he wrote. “And it may well be that such restrictions violate the Free Exercise Clause. It is not necessary, however, for us to rule on that serious and difficult question at this time.”
The court’s three liberal members were to varying degrees prepared to support the restrictions. Chief Justice Roberts made a point of defending his colleagues from Justice Gorsuch’s attacks, saying they were operating in good faith.
“To be clear,” the chief justice wrote, quoting from Justice Gorsuch’s concurring opinion, “I do not regard my dissenting colleagues as ‘cutting the Constitution loose during a pandemic,’ yielding to ‘a particular judicial impulse to stay out of the way in times of crisis,’ or ‘sheltering in place when the Constitution is under attack.’ They simply view the matter differently after careful study and analysis reflecting their best efforts to fulfill their responsibility under the Constitution.”
In a separate dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, said the majority was being reckless. “Justices of this court play a deadly game,” she wrote, “in second-guessing the expert judgment of health officials about the environments in which a contagious virus, now infecting a million Americans each week, spreads most easily.”
"The traditional story of Thanksgiving, and by extension the Pilgrims — the one repeated in school history books and given the Peanuts treatment in "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving" — doesn’t start in 1620, with the cold and seasick Pilgrims stepping off the Mayflower onto Plymouth Rock.
It also doesn’t start a year later, with the Pilgrims and the native Wampanoag all sitting together to “break bread” and celebrate their first successful harvest and a long, harmonious relationship to come.
It doesn’t start there because those things never happened, despite being immortalized in American mythos for generations.
The Pilgrims spent only a few weeks of 1620 in the Wampanoag village of Patuxet, which they would rename Plimoth (now Plymouth), and they certainly didn’t step off onto Plymouth Rock. As for that 1621 feast — the supposed genesis of today’s Thanksgiving tradition — there was a small feast, but the Wampanoag were not invited, they showed up later. Their role in helping the Pilgrims survive by sharing resources and wisdom went unacknowledged that day, according to accounts of the toasts given by Plymouth leaders.
Lincoln’s first Thanksgiving Day didn't mention Pilgrims
The first national Thanksgiving Day did not invoke the Pilgrims at all. In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln declared a Thanksgiving Day on the last Thursday of November, looking to reconcile a country in the throes of the Civil War.
On a parallel track, the story of the Pilgrim forefathers coming to the New World and founding America for religious freedom gained steam, as New England Protestants wielded the myth to gain the top spot in the country’s cultural hierarchy, above Catholics and immigrants, according to historian David Silverman in his book “This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving.”
As Americans looked for an origin story that wasn’t soaked in the blood of Native Americans or built on the backs of slavery, the humble, bloodless story of the 102 Pilgrims forging a path in the New World in search of religious freedom was just what they needed, according to Silverman. Regardless of whether it was rooted in historical fact, it became accepted as such.
In 1963, these two tracks crossed when President John F. Kennedy, whose family frolicked in the home of the native Nauset and Aquinnah people on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, immortalized them in his own Thanksgiving Day proclamation, baking the plaits together like the bread broken and shared in the mythic first Thanksgiving feast.
The historically accurate story of the Pilgrims and the founding of Plymouth Colony 400 years ago this month is not in most school history books. It also is not the one you’ll find at Pilgrim Memorial Park in Plymouth, home of the famed Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower II, a replica of the cargo ship turned people carrier the Pilgrims crammed into to cross the Atlantic.
The more historically accurate telling is gaining a foothold in small circles, as members of the Herring Pond, Mashpee and AquinnahWampanoag tribes; Michele Pecoraro, executive director of Plymouth 400, who is helping lead the anniversary commemoration; and Silverman bring the documented facts to light.
“How are we supposed to improve on this sorry record if we don’t understand the sorry record?” asked Silverman, a George Washington University professor.
“I think the only way forward is to understand the history the way that it happened,” Steven Peters, a spokesman for the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, said. He and other Mashpee and Herring Pond Wampanoag tribe members have been working with museums and on platforms such as Vimeo to elevate the history of the indigenous people who lived in the region for thousands of years before the Pilgrims arrived.
“At that point, it really changes your perspective.”
Hostility, slavery and pandemic
Tradition dictates the Pilgrims’ story starts in September 1620, with the departure of the Mayflower, packed with colonists and sailors, leaving England to set sail for the New World.
But starting there ignores years of European contact with the Native people of New England, and paints the Wampanoag and their neighbors in the broad stroke of simplicity, ignoring the complex regional relationships and politicking at play.
The story could start a century earlier, in 1524, at the first known contact between Native Americans in southern New England and Europeans, in Narragansett Bay near Aquidneck Island.
Or 1602, when Bartholomew Gosnold visited Cape Cod and what’s now known as Martha’s Vineyard, where contact with the Wampanoag started with trading and ended in violence. As Silverman writes in his book, future annual encounters between the two would follow this same, high-tension pattern.
Or in 1614, when a Nauset (Cape Cod) tribe member named Epenow was captured by Europeans and kept in bondage for three years. He engineered an escape and returned to his people on Martha’s Vineyard. That same year, Tisquantum, later known as Squanto, and 19 other Wampanoag men were lured on to an English ship, taken captive and sold into slavery.
Tisquantum, who spent time in Spain and London, would later return to Patuxet (now Plymouth) and he and Epenow would play important roles in burgeoning Wampanoag-Pilgrim relations. Only Squanto was immortalized in the Pilgrim story.
But perhaps the best starting point, according to Peters and other historians, is 1616, when a lethal pandemic tore through many Wampanoag villages. In three years, once populous villages like Patuxet, where the Pilgrims would eventually settle, were “utterly void” of people, as English explorer Thomas Dermer wrote. Further threatening the existence of the Wampanoag, the Narragansett Tribe, their powerful western rivals, were left largely untouched.
"We weren't used to diseases here," said Hazel Currence, an elder with the Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe, which lived in Patuxet. "Our systems were not used to the illnesses that came with the Europeans and the Pilgrims."
So by 1620, the Wampanoag, as Peters describes, were in a “difficult spot,” shaped by years of volatile contact with Europeans, slavery, regional threats to their power and a mysterious, devastating illness.
“For me, that’s a really important place to start, because you understand the big decisions that were made,” Peters said. “It would have been a hugely complex situation.”
Why Massasoit helped the Pilgrims
When the Mayflower anchored off what is now known as Provincetown, the Pilgrims found themselves not in a vast, untouched land held for them by divine province, but amid indigenous people wary and distrustful of Europeans, and the complex politics of rival tribes.
It’s hard to separate the Pilgrims from what the United States would eventually become, Silverman said. It’s easy to believe they arrived here seeking religious freedom and intending to eventually form their own country based on those ideals, he said.
“Many white Americans hold it very dear, the idea that the main impetus for colonization was the search for religious freedom,” Silverman said. “If you ask the general public, even educated people, that's the most common explanation. It's not right.”
The congregation of Puritans within the Pilgrims did break off from the Church of England for religious reasons, but that brought them to Holland, where they were free to practice their religion. After a decade of struggling to find jobs and fearing the Dutch influence on their children, the congregants sought a charter from The London Company to start a colony in America, although it was originally granted for land around the mouth of the Hudson River.
The Pilgrims’ main concerns were their own survival in the New World and turning a profit for those who backed the venture. That survival was made possible with help from the Wampanoag, the piece left unsaid at the feast that would become Thanksgiving.
The decision to help the Pilgrims, whose ilk had been raiding Native villages and enslaving their people for nearly a century, came after they stole Native food and seed stores and dug up Native graves, pocketing funerary offerings, as described by Pilgrim leader Edward Winslow in “Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth,” published in 1622.
That decision was made by Ousamequin, more commonly known as Massasoit, which means “great sachem.” In a structure that Peters says was far closer to a democratic government than the Pilgrim government, Wampanoag territory was organized into sachemships, each with a sachem — a leader — who would oversee that particular village. Sachems ruled by the will of the people. Each sachemship was independent but had relationships with the other sachemships, all coming under the purview of the great sachem.
Massasoit has gone through a bit of a rebrand in the ensuing centuries to be painted as the “protector and preserver” of the Pilgrims — as it says on the statue dedicated to him overlooking Plymouth Rock. But his decision to allow the Pilgrims to stay at Patuxet (now Plymouth) and eventually provide them aid after they were driven off the Cape, Peters said, had less to do with a sense of dutiful benevolence and more to do with a careful weighing of circumstances and outcomes.
Driving off or killing the Pilgrims, as many tribes, including the Nauset and specifically Epenow, wanted, was a valid option. From their point of view, whatever benefit they might gain would not be worth the threat of betrayal, violence and enslavement that seemed to follow contact with the Europeans. But it would cost valuable warriors, in short supply after the pandemic, and there was the risk of Europeans returning in overwhelming numbers or, worse, sailing around the Outer Cape to take their guns, knives and armor to the Narragansett, according to Silverman.
Allowing the Pilgrims to settle and establishing diplomatic relations with them, even providing aid, brought risks but also reward. The guns, knives and armor the Pilgrims carried would intimidate enemies threatening Wampanoag territory. And, after generations of trading secondhand and thirdhand for coveted European goods from neighboring Native peoples, the Wampanoag would finally gain a firsthand source and considerable trading power.
Massasoit weighed the risks and concluded it was better to have the danger on his side than have to face it.
“We needed a friend,” Peters said. “We needed an ally. That would have been a really difficult decision for them to make.”
Wampanoag and Pilgrims: A deal and a meal
As these debates were happening among the Wampanoag, the Pilgrims, most of whom were still living on the cramped and creaking Mayflower, struggled to survive the winter. Half of them died of illness, cold, starvation or a combination of the three.
Throughout the season, the Wampanoag made their presence known but did not approach until February, when Samoset, a visiting Abenaki tribesman from Maine, approached Pilgrim leaders. He spoke English and carried a subtle message — the Wampanoag were ready for peace or war with their new neighbors, and the Pilgrims needed to make their intentions clear.
Several weeks later, in late March, diplomatic relations between the two groups formally opened when Massasoit arrived in Plymouth, his face painted deep red, and flanked by about 60 intimidating warriors. With Tisquantum acting as a broker, the two groups worked out a kind of alliance through a series of visits, exchanges and the belief, at least on the part of the Wampanoag, that this small band of Pilgrims would stay just that: small.
“I don’t think anyone at that point would have gone into an agreement with the Pilgrims if they knew how quickly they would multiply and start arriving,” Peters said.
Several months later, after receiving help and protection from the Wampanoag, the Pilgrims held the harvest feast that would form the crux of the Thanksgiving myth centuries later. Wampanoag members were not even invited, but they showed up. A group of about 100 men and Massasoit came not to celebrate but, according to Peters, mostly as a reminder that they controlled the land the Pilgrims were staying on and they vastly outnumbered their new European neighbors.
This is where the traditional telling of the Pilgrims and the Thanksgiving myth ends, with the two groups sitting down to dinner, celebrating their partnership and, for the Pilgrims, celebrating their successful colony and toasting to a future to come. But in the same way the real story stretches back before the arrival of the Pilgrims, it stretches forward.
In a little more than 50 years, European settlers would vastly outnumber the indigenous people, with growing settlements such as the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the north and Rhode Island to the south.
By the 1670s Massasoit was dead and his son Wamsutta had died after he was imprisoned in Plymouth for negotiating a land sale to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. At the same time, colonists were pressing deeper and deeper across the region. Relations between the settlers and the Native people would deteriorate into the devastating King Philip's War, which ended with death, enslavement or displacement for the majority of the Native people living in southern New England.
The head of another of Massasoit’s sons, Metacomet, better known as King Philip, was mounted on a pike outside Plymouth Colony as a warning, and the descendants of Massasoit, the Pilgrims’ great “protector and preserver,” were captured and sold into slavery in the West Indies.
There’s a reason this part of the story did not make it into school history books and pageants or get remembered on Thanksgiving.
“It’s not a fun story,” Peters said, but its telling brings the focus away from the white Europeans, the Pilgrims, and shifts the balance back to the people who were harmed. Its telling builds the empathy that has been sorely lacking when it comes to Native American lives.
“No one has acknowledged these atrocities happened,” Peters said, bringing up King Philip's War. “Yet when we talk about it, there’s zero empathy. The native life doesn’t hold the same value.
“I think if we can get people to come to terms with the history and the way it happened, they can start to look at Native American lives on the same plane as European lives,” he said.
Raising up Native voices
Trying to move that focus, as Michele Pecoraro and Plymouth 400 have done for their commemoration, comes with pushback — people saying they shouldn’t use their organization and the 400th anniversary to disparage the Pilgrims. But when you’ve been telling a story one way for four centuries, any change feels like a monumental one, she said.
“I do believe that the way we’ve gone about it is as balanced as we could make it,” said Pecoraro, who is helping lead the commemoration. “In order to balance something like this, you have to swing the pendulum a little more to one side.”
To bring the commemorations into the 21st century, Pecoraro and her group worked to elevate the voices of the Wampanoag, who still live in southern New England.
The Wampanoag have survived and clung to their culture despite centuries of systemic removal from their land, destruction of their culture and denial of their rights. More recently, the Trump administration has been working to revoke the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe’s federal tribal status and hundreds of acres of previously recognized tribal lands.
"Out of the 69 tribes of just Wampanoag people who lived here pre-contact, only three — the Herring Pond, the Aquinnah and the Mashpee, plus a band of Assonet peoples, are still here," said Troy Currence, a medicine man with the Herring Pond Tribe. "We're lucky to be one of them. We survived. We’re still here. We have a chance to reclaim our language and our history and re-educate people. We didn't go away, we adapted."
At the same time, Peters does not think Thanksgiving should go the way of Confederate statues and names of slaveholders on buildings as the nation reckons with its history.
He will continue to celebrate Thanksgiving — something he and his family do every year, after the National Day of Mourning in Plymouth. But it is important to bring the other side of history to light, he said, correcting inaccuracies and adding context to monuments and museums.
“Even though it’s inaccurate, we can’t just bury it,” he said. “There’s a place where those things do belong, as a point that we don’t make that mistake ever again.”
"Don't believe everything you learned in school about the Pilgrims and the Native people who met them.
From the landing on Plymouth Rock to the harmonious feast with the native Wampanoags, the story about the Pilgrims — and by extension, the story of Thanksgiving — is rife with myth and inaccuracy.
Here are three myths that have been corrected based on documented history:
Myth: The Pilgrims were the first Europeans to land in Southern New England and to interact with the Native people.
The commonly told version of the 1620 Mayflower landing is the Pilgrims were the first Europeans to step onto the shores of Massachusetts. According to historic accounts, however, Europeans had been visiting New England since at least the late 1400s. The Basques, English and French had a thriving fishing industry off the coast of Maine and New England. The first documented European to make contact with either the Narragansetts or the Wampanoags in Southern New England was Italian explorer Giovanni de Verrazano, who, in 1524, while sailing for the French, traveled up Narragansett Bay and traded with the Native people he found there.
In fact, several Native Americans in the area spoke English by the time the Pilgrims arrived in 1620, picked up either through trading encounters or by previously being taken into slavery by the English, but they either escaped or were returned to the area. Samoset, Tisquantum, or “Squanto,” and Epenow, all spoke English and played important roles in burgeoning relations between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags, as detailed by historian and author David Silverman in his book, "This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving."
Myth: The Pilgrims came to the New World seeking religious freedom.
The group we most often associate with the Pilgrims — the Puritan congregation that separated from the Church of England — did, at least partially, come to America looking for a place where they could practice their religion without persecution. Puritans made up less than half of the more than 100 people who crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower and settled what would eventually become Plymouth, as detailed in William Bradford's "Of Plimouth Plantation."
The main reason they came to America was to maintain their English culture and to make money. After splitting off from the Church of England near the turn of the 17th century, the congregation fled to Holland, which allowed for more religious freedom. But they found it difficult to find jobs to support themselves and were worried their children were being too influenced by Dutch culture and morals.
Myth: The Pilgrims and Wampanoags came together in November 1621 for a Thanksgiving feast.
There’s a lot to unpack with this one, and not just because it forms the basis of our country’s Thanksgiving Day story.
First, while the Puritans did have “days of Thanksgiving” they were literally the opposite of a big, fun, family feast. They were usually days of fasting and prayer that maybe would be broken with a larger meal.
Edward Winslow, in his writing about the first few years in Plymouth titled “Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims in Plymouth,” does mention a celebration marking the settlement’s first successful harvest, probably held around October 1621. Given the context, it certainly wasn’t a huge deal but it would later become one in modern America.
According to Winslow, despite the fact the Wampanoags had allowed the Pilgrims to live on their land, provided them with aid and taught them how to grow native crops, the Wampanoags were not invited to this celebration. They arrived only after the Pilgrims started shooting their guns into the air. Believing themselves to be under attack, the Wampanoags head sachem, Massasoit, showed up at the settlement with about 90 warriors expecting war. Instead, they found a celebration and they decided to stay, with their hunters bringing in five deer as a contribution. Rather than a happy celebration of camaraderie and partnership, the feast that would serve as the basis of the traditional Thanksgiving myth was actually quite a tense affair, fraught with political implications. "
