When American presidents visit another country, they typically like to highlight the positive history they share. But as the first leader of the United States to visit Angola, President Biden opted instead to focus on the most bitter chapter that connects the United States and this giant southern African nation.
At the National Museum of Slavery in the capital, Luanda, Mr. Biden recalled in a speech on Tuesday the slave trade that once defined relations between America and Angola. More Africans sold into slavery in the United States came from this part of the continent than anywhere else, scholars say, a legacy of inhumanity that remains relevant four centuries later.
The president’s decision to emphasize that connection served not only as a nod to the wounds inflicted on generations of Africans, but also as a statement of principle in the contemporary debate underway in his own country about how to teach and remember history. At a time when some Republicans have sought to limit instruction about slavery and other shameful chapters of American history, Mr. Biden argued for confronting the past.
“I have learned that while history can be hidden, it cannot and should not be erased,” the president told an audience at the museum, where he was joined by several Black Americans whose descendants were enslaved in Angola and trafficked across the Atlantic Ocean. “It should be faced. It’s our duty to face our history — the good, the bad and the ugly, the whole truth. That’s what great nations do.”
He called slavery “cruel, brutal, dehumanizing, our nation’s original sin, original sin, one that haunted America and cast a long shadow ever since.” And while the United States has never fully “lived up to that idea” of a truly equal society, he said, “we’ve never fully walked away from it, either.”
Among those on hand for Mr. Biden’s visit was Wanda Tucker, a descendant of William Tucker, believed to be the first enslaved child born in the United States. His parents were brought from Angola to colonial Virginia in 1619 aboard the White Lion, a Portuguese ship. The William Tucker 1624 Society was organized to research and share the stories of the first enslaved people brought to Virginia.
Long before coming to Angola for the first and only trip to sub-Saharan Africa of his presidency, Mr. Biden had taken steps to reckon with the history of racism and slavery in America.
Shortly after he came into office, he made Juneteenth a federal holiday to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States. His vice president, Kamala Harris, in 2023 visited the Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, a site used for the slave trade in the 17th century.
Mr. Biden also has at times expressed concern over the attempts in the United States to restrict how the less-flattering parts of American history are taught. He screened the movie “Till,” about the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a Black teenager, in the same White House theater where, in 1915, President Woodrow Wilson premiered “The Birth of a Nation,” a film celebrating the Ku Klux Klan.
Mr. Biden later established a national monument honoring the slain teenager and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, just as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida came under fire after education officials in his state decreed that middle schoolers should be taught that enslaved people benefited by developing skills from slavery.
In May, Mr. Biden spoke to a crowd at the National Museum of African American History and Culture to celebrate the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark civil rights ruling that outlawed racially segregated schools. As a senator, Mr. Biden cosponsored legislation to establish the museum.
But in his speech on Tuesday, Mr. Biden also pivoted forward to stress how far the United States and Africa had come since those days of misery. He pointed to U.S. investments and other commitments to the continent, where Angola is an important source of oil and mineral resources.
Like other presidents, Mr. Biden said he had worked to transform the basis of the modern-day relationship from one of aid to one of trade.
“The United States is expanding our relationship all across Africa from assistance to aid, investment to trade, moving from patrons to partners to help bridge the infrastructure gap,” he said. “The right question in the year 2024 is not what can the United States do for the people of Africa. It’s what can we do together for the people of Africa.”
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