Centering 1526 at Morehouse Reconsiders Where the American Story Begins

Morehouse College symposium brings scholars, students and cultural practitioners into a 500-year conversation about Gullah Geechee history, African presence, resistance, memory and the narratives that shape America.

ATLANTA — Five hundred years after the events of 1526, scholars, students, cultural practitioners and the public will gather at Morehouse College on Thursday, October 1, 2026, to reconsider a fundamental question about American history:

What changes when we change the point from which we enter African and American histories?

That question sits at the center of Centering 1526: Symposium & Imbongi, convened by the Department of Africana Studies and History at Morehouse College in collaboration with the Afro-Mosaic Cinema Summit.

The gathering is shaped by the scholarship of Dr. Samuel T. Livingston, Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Morehouse College, and the developing work surrounding the forthcoming edited volume Centering 1526: The Gullah-Geechee Origins of an Africana National Imagination.

The project asks audiences to look beyond the historical starting points that have traditionally framed the African American experience and consider an earlier chapter: San Miguel de Gualdape and the events of 1526.

Established by Spanish colonizer Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, San Miguel de Gualdape brought enslaved Africans into what would become the United States nearly a century before 1619. Within months, Africans at the settlement resisted their enslavement amid the colony’s collapse, creating a history of African presence and resistance that complicates conventional narratives about when Black history in what would become the United States begins.

For Centering 1526, that history is not simply about replacing one date with another.

It is about examining what becomes visible when the historical frame itself changes.

The scholarship explores the legacy of Africa and African presence in the Americas, Gullah Geechee history and culture, diasporic liberation movements, land, sovereignty, cultural memory, and resistance, while considering the significance of 1526 across the last 500 years of Black history.

By foregrounding African presence, culture, and agency before the rise of the conventional Anglo-American founding narrative, the project opens a broader conversation about how history is constructed, whose experiences become foundational, and how those narratives continue to shape contemporary understandings of identity, belonging, and power.

From Historical Inquiry to Cultural Intelligence

Centering 1526 also reflects the larger mission of the Afro-Mosaic Cinema Summit, the Alma Film Festival’s platform for bringing cinema and storytelling into conversation with scholarship, history, literature, technology, lived experience and cultural exchange.

The premise is that cultural intelligence begins with understanding the histories and frameworks through which communities see themselves—and through which others learn to see them.

At Morehouse, that inquiry takes an explicitly scholarly and public form.

Throughout the day, historical research will move into conversation with student scholarship, cultural memory, sovereignty, land, and community dialogue. Acclaimed author, educator, performer, and Gullah Geechee cultural interpreter Ron Daise will deliver the Crown Forum keynote, providing a cultural foundation for the larger conversation.

The symposium will culminate in an African Diaspora Imbongi, extending the discussion beyond traditional academic exchange and inviting the public into a deeper process of reflection, dialogue, and community grounding.

The historical lens may begin with 1526, but the inquiry ultimately looks in both directions.

After examining five centuries of African presence, resistance, memory, and cultural survival, Centering 1526 poses another question:

What should our common goals be for the next 500 years?

That movement—from historical recovery to collective imagination—is central to the project.

It asks not only what happened in 1526, but what that history makes possible when brought more fully into the American story.

Centering 1526: Symposium & Imbongi takes place Thursday, October 1, 2026, at Morehouse College and within the Atlanta University Center as part of the Afro-Mosaic Cinema Summit and the Alma Film Festival’s five-day Atlanta gathering.

[View the Complete Centering 1526 Symposium & Imbongi Schedule →]

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