History teaches us Virginia Dare of the ill-fated Roanoke colony is the first child born of English descent in the land that was soon to become America- but what of the first child born of African ancestry?
As it turns out, the first of African ancestry to be born on the soil of the New World was a male named William Tucker. Listed as the son of “Antoney and Isabell,” Tucker was born in 1624 near Jamestown, Virginia.
According to the 1624-1625 Virginia Census records, Tucker’s parents were among 22 Africans living in Virginia — the first of which arrived in 1619, their status described as indentured servants.
Though little may be gleaned from census records, a picture has formed for historians of William Tucker nonetheless. His parents worked as indentured servants for Captain William Tucker and his wife, Mary Tucker.
Indentured servants were forbidden marriage, yet the captain allowed Tucker’s parents to wed sometime in the 1620s. The happy couple were married for one-year when their son William Tucker was born. He was baptised in the Anglican Church and named after the family’s master.
Ultimately, William Tucker would be counted among Captain Tucker’s 17 servants, and census records indicate there were two other servant children in the captain’s home, both white, that were born around the same time as William.
As indentured servants, Tucker’s parents were not slaves, so they received the same rights, duties, privileges, responsibilities, and punishments as their white indentured counterparts, and most were given land at the end of their indenture as contracted.
It is believed William Tucker and his descendents lived in a free black community known to have existed in the days prior to the Civil War inside Virginia.
Despite the importance of William Tucker’s birth, so much of his life has tragically been lost to history. It is unclear if or who he married, if he had children, or even when he died — yet William Tucker can forever be remembered as truly the first African-American.
