Invited review published in bookscover2cover
“Even dawn begins before its beginning . . .” writes poet Claudia Rankine in “The White Lion.” It is a fitting early line in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, a book comprising poetry, essays, fiction, photography, and a timeline that leads 
the reader through four hundred years of history, much of it rarely, if ever, told and through voices that seldom pierce the citadel of popular historical certainty.
This dawn features a ship, the White Lion, arriving at Point Comfort in the colony of Virginia in 1619, a year before the customary chronicling of the 1620 pilgrims’ landing at Jamestown. The timeline entry preceding the poem tells of the ship’s chained cargo of twenty to thirty captive Africans, who are traded to the colonists for supplies, “making them the first enslaved Africans in the English colonies that will become the United States.”
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