The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

America's Earliest Africans

Clip: Episode 1 | 1m 19s

Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. discusses two of the earliest Africans to arrive in North America---free men who journeyed to this continent a century before the first Africans who arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. Both were explorers who found hope and opportunity in this new land. But things changed quickly for those who followed them.