Melinda Steele met Calvin Pearson around 2016, but the two became closer after she began working at Hampton University in 2017.
When she ran into Pearson, a Hampton athletics booster, at a university sporting event he asked a profound question.
“The first question he asked me was ‘Do you happen to know where the landing of the first enslaved Africans happened?’” Steele said. “And the first thing that popped out of my mouth was ‘I thought I learned in the book Jamestown’ – and that’s where it started.”
And she never looked back.
Pearson founded Project 1619, Inc. in 2008. But after he and his colleague Bill Wiggins died this fall, Steele now finds herself at the helm of the organization and charged with carrying its mission forward.
The project’s new set of leaders are now working on new plans to share the story of the first African people forced to come to English North America.
Pearson in 2008 began gathering members to join Project 1619, including Wiggins and numerous others. The group together worked to correct the narrative about the “20 and odd” people taken from now-Angola to Old Point Comfort – and led efforts to see a memorial commemorating that history at Fort Monroe.
Pearson, at the time Project 1619’s president, died on Labor Day after a period of illness. Wiggins, a retired Hampton University historian, was chosen as his successor before dying at the end of that same month.
After losing two presidents in the course of a month, Project 1619’s board began looking to the future. It elected Steele president last week. She had previously been the organization’s vice president and was the preferred successor of both prior presidents. Steele said the board plans to grow the group beyond Hampton Roads.
“We want to expand the notoriety of the organization globally,” she said.
Steele said the board needs more time to formalize its new plans before making them public.
“We are definitely going to continue with the baseline mission (of correcting the narrative),” she said. “But we will build on top of that.”
In recent years, the group has pushed for the start of a long-planned African Landing memorial and contributed to forming a sister city relationship with Malanje Province, Angola.
Expanding on that relationship and “bridging the gap” between the U.S. and the African continent will be important, according to Venita Benitez, who will serve as Steele’s vice president.
“By the memorial pointing to Angola, and them pointing back to us, there was a door of no return,” she said. “Now, this is the door of return to understand the full circle of where it began.”
The board also elected Larry “Kamau” Gibson to serve as the organization's ambassador. Gibson is credited for coining the “door of return” concept for the memorial.
Steele and Benitez believe it’s as crucial as ever to make this step, but they are aware it may come with resistance.
President-elect Donald Trump has criticized the New York Times’ 1619 Project, a journalistic work by Nikole Hannah-Jones that was similar in topic and name but created after the Hampton Roads-based group. He compared teaching about systemic racism in U.S. classrooms to child abuse in the past.
“We’ve been up against resistance since the initial seeds,” Benitez said. “It’s going to happen, that leaves us with a platform to educate.”
Steele said forming strong partnerships, such as Project 1619, Inc. has with the Fort Monroe Authority, will be “extremely important” as the organization grows its footprint.
“We have so many out there who want to silence the history, you cannot allow the silencing,” she said. “If you don’t know where you came from, how you going to know where you’re going?”
Steele said preserving the true story of the first Africans taken to Virginia is not just important to American history, but Angolan and African history as well.
“We’re going to be faced with a lot of opposition from a lot of different angles, and it’s not just American,” she said. “But we’re ready for the battle… This is the time that we are most needed.”
In addition to a full accounting of history, Benitez sees a possibility for healing and unity that was sewn into the early fabric of Project 1619’s mission.
“It’s all about connecting what we believe in is the Most High, and the connection to our ancestors,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of hurt in our country, and we have to connect African Americans to Africa. That’s very, very important that that connection takes place.”
