"We were stolen, sold and bought together from the African continent. We got on the slave ships together. We lay back to belly in the holds of the slave ships in each other's excrement and urine together, sometimes died together, and our lifeless bodies thrown overboard together. Today, we are standing up together, with faith and even some joy."  

 —Maya Angelou (inscription) 

The African-American Monument on River Street  

The prohibition against chattel slavery has always been pitched as the unique cornerstone of the Georgia Trustee's Plan after the colony received its original charter from King George II.  

Well – at first, it actually wasn't, until it was for a short time, after which the prohibition of slavery again wasn't until after the Civil War. The Georgia Charter did not explicitly prohibit slavery. That came by legislation drafted in England in 1734, which received Royal approval in 1735. Ultimately, the prohibition of Black slavery in Georgia remained only fifteen years from the inception of the Georgia Colony. 

When James Oglethorpe founded the Colony in Georgia in 1733, the Black population throughout the British North American Colonies approximated a little over ninety-thousand souls. Naturally, almost all were people stolen from Africa, shipped in chains to the New World, and held captive in bondage.  

However, the first enslaved peoples to enter the coastal region (nearby Georgia) came in 1526 with Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon of Spain to help establish the colony of San Miguel de Gualdape. It was the first colony founded on (what is now) US soil, established on coastal lands between Georgia and South Carolina. These early Spanish colonialists introduced the first enslaved Africans to the continent. But the enslaved people successfully revolted, and the Spanish colony quickly failed and was abandoned. 

The Georgia project began as a romantic British philanthropic and charitable concern that included the practical political goal of establishing a military buffer between South Carolina and Spanish Florida. 

Still, in the beginning, the founding Georgia Trustees were not precisely anti-slavery. Soon after stepping ashore and climbing to the bluffs above the Savannah River, founder James Oglethorpe employed slave labor from South Carolina to assist colonialists in building the city.  

Indeed, the Georgia Trustees' fundamental dedication was admirable: establishing a refuge and escape valve for Britain's oppressed, dispossessed, and discontented underclass. The idea was to remove England's miserable wretches to the New World to offer the opportunity to earn Christian redemption through hard work — all while serving the motherland's significant economic and military interests. 

Colonialists quickly realized the information the Georgia Trustees based their economic blueprint upon for building the Colony of Georgia economy was flawed. The settlers faced malarial swamps and impenetrable forests. They only had to look north to neighboring South Carolina to find what worked. 

The environments of the two colonies were similar. The new Georgians imagined only the prohibition of slavery prevented colonialists from reaching personal aspirations for wealth and comfort. Within 15-years of arrival, Colonialists adopted slavery, while the Trustees abandoned their philanthropic project.  

The African-American Monument found on River Street is a stark reminder of the people — a family presented as held in its place by brutal chains around their feet — who literally and figuratively built Savannah for the next one-hundred and fifteen years.  

Maya Angelou's inscription on this critical public Monument is bleak and truthful. And that truth, linked together with faith and joy, needs forever to be burned into Savanniahian memory.