Biden, in Angola, Warns That Slavery’s History Should Not be Erased

In becoming the first American leader to visit Angola, President Biden said it was important not to forget the ugly legacy of the human trade that originally defined relations with Africa.

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 from 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 injustices 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 ancestors 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.”

Speaking under a rainy sky on a stretch of the Atlantic Ocean coast where enslaved people were forced onto ships, Mr. Biden 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.

“It’s incredibly awesome to have the president of the United States to come to the homeland where the first enslaved people were taken from,” Ms. Tucker said in an interview outside the museum, which was founded in 1977 and will receive a U.S. grant of $229,000 to support restoration and conservation.

“It’s even more important because we have to keep the history and the story going wherever there are opportunities to tell the story,” Ms. Tucker said.

While many Americans focus on countries like Senegal and Ghana when tracing the history of slavery, Angola was a major center for the capture and sale of human beings. As many as 6 million people were kidnapped from this part of Africa, forced to march as much as 100 miles and loaded onto ships to the Western Hemisphere. Slavery “would decimate the Angolan population for over 300 years,” Daniel Metcalfe wrote in “Blue Dahlia, Black Gold,” his 2013 book on modern Angola.

About a quarter of all enslaved Africans forced to go to the United States came from the area that includes modern-day Angola, according to SlaveVoyages, a digital database. Today, there are nearly 12 million Americans of Angolan descent, according to the U.S. government.

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 14-year-old, 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 minerals.

Mr. Biden met with President João Lourenço, who has made a point of bolstering relations with the United States and visited the White House during Mr. Biden’s term. Like other presidents, Mr. Biden said he had worked to transform the relationship with Africa from one based on aid to one based on 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.”

Mr. Lourenço welcomed his guest, saying that Mr. Biden’s decision to visit Angola marked a “turning point” for the two nations. He applauded Mr. Biden’s “great contribution” to the development of Angola through the Lobito Corridor project, a U.S.-funded rail line that will link Angola with Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Left unmentioned both in public and in the private meeting with Mr. Lourenço, according to American officials, was the incoming president, Donald J. Trump, whose imminent takeover of the White House has loomed over Mr. Biden’s visit. Mr. Trump never visited Africa while president, and referred to some of its countries using an epithet.

Mr. Biden brought with him a delegation of American political, civic and business leaders.

“It’s important that we’re here because of the historical significance, but the president also made a commitment to look at Africa, to invest in Africa,” Derrick Johnson, the president of the N.A.A.C.P., said in an interview. “We need to work with the African nations to rebuild and strengthen the infrastructure.”

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