African people arrived in America a year before the Mayflower

Evidence

I had assumed that Before the Mayflower referred to Black people’s history in Africa before they were enslaved on this land. Tracing my fingers across the words, I realized that the title evoked not a remote African history but an American one. African people had lived here, on the land that in 1776 would form the United States, since the White Lion dropped anchor in the year 1619. They’d arrived one year before the iconic ship carrying the English people who got the credit for building it all. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 24

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the book title’s actual referent: an American origin story, not African pre-slavery history.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s case-study focus: origin dating determines who ‘got the credit for building it all’ — the reframing thesis in miniature.