DeWayne Wickham

Opinion contributor

I don’t know how long it was after August 1619, when the first enslaved Africans were brought ashore to Virginia, that my ancestors ended up in America. But I know my family’s journey from slavery to freedom was an arduous one.

While the United States didn’t end slavery until 1865, the importation of African men, women and children into this country for use as chattel was banned in 1807. That was the same year that John Wickham, the most prominent attorney in Virginia, joined the team of lawyers that represented Aaron Burr in his treason trial.

Somehow, my ancestors — who most likely came from a stretch of West Africa that includes Togo, Benin, Cameroon and Congo, according to a DNA search — became the property of the Wickham family. My great-grandfather, John Cassius Wickham, was born in 1847.

A Civil War battle and a family name

My great-grandfather was still enslaved when the Civil War broke out in 1861. The head of the white Wickham clan at that time was Williams Carter Wickham, who quickly rose to the rank of brigadier general in the Confederate Army. In 1864, Gen. Wickham fought in the war’s biggest cavalry engagement, not far from Hickory Hill, his 3,300 acre plantation.

It was called the Battle of Trevilian Station, and I suspect my great-grandfather was close enough to the fighting to inhale the pungent smell of musket powder. Years later he named one of his sons — my grandfather — Trevillian Wickham.

400 years after slaves came to America:

Enslaved Africans landed in Virginia in 1619. USA TODAY is committed to telling the story, past and present

We should welcome deep digs into 1619. Slavery and white supremacy shaped today's America.

Maybe it was his father’s years of enslavement or his dad’s inability to be more than a laborer the rest of his life that moved my grandfather to join the U.S. armed forces. At the start of World War I, Trevillian Wickham had already served 2 1/2 years in the Navy. Even so, he answered the nation’s call and registered for the draft on June 5, 1917, the very day it took effect.

Military path to American dream

There has always been a fairly widespread belief among black Americans that by risking our lives in military service, we could secure for ourselves the “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” that the Founding Fathers said was the inalienable right of citizens.

This, I suspect, is why some 198,000 black Americans served in the Union Army and Navy during the Civil War. Twenty-three of them received the Medal of Honor, this nation’s highest honor for courageous acts in combat. And I think it’s the reason my father followed in his father’s footsteps.

The United States was drawn into World War II in December 1941. My father, John Trevillian Wickham, listed on military records as a “semiskilled” warehouseman, enlisted in the Army a year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. At 20 years old, he was already married with a wife and son.

Between the two wars, my grandfather held a succession of dead-end, low-paying jobs. But his failure to climb above America’s floor of opportunity didn’t dampen my father’s belief that service to this country was the way to break the grip of the underclass status that far too many black Americans had been unable to escape since our ancestors arrived here in 1619.

Tragedy born of poverty, oppression

The United States entered World War II 323 years after America received its first shipment of enslaved blacks and 77 years after it adopted a constitutional amendment that banned slavery. But in 1942, when my father shipped out for North Africa, the nation hadn’t really moved that far from its racist past. It sent its soldiers, sailors and airmen to war in racially segregated units.

That only started to change when American forces took heavy casualties in the final months of the war in Europe. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied forces, put out a call for volunteers to fill the depleted ranks of his white combat units. My father was one of more than 2,000 black soldiers who stepped forward.

He was assigned to the 56th Armored Infantry Battalion of the 12th Armored Division. For his service in that unit, my father received a Bronze Star. Even so, after the war he struggled to find a job that lifted our family out of poverty. When I was born, my parents gave me the middle name of Trevillian and took me home to a small apartment in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood of Baltimore that in 2015 become ground zero for a racial uprising.

On Dec. 17, 1954, a week before Christmas, my father wrote a short letter about his failure to find money to buy holiday gifts for his five children. Then he took my mother’s life and killed himself.

Even a war hero denied a fair chance

My family’s tragedy has been replayed in many ways over the past 400 years by too many black Americans. It is a tragedy born of enslavement, the dehumanization and hopelessness that 246 years of legal bondage and 100 years of Jim Crow practices have foisted upon my race. While many black Americans have stood tall in resistance to centuries of degradation, some have been bent over by the withering effects of racial oppression. And a few, like my father, were broken by the ever-changing nature of a racism that denied even a black war hero a fair chance at life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

More from the 1619 project:

Knowing where you come from is important. Leave us a message to help record black history

Experience the harrowing journey of the first enslaved Africans to land in America

Searching for answers: Wanda Tucker's spiritual journey to where the slave trade began

Despite all of this, when America went to war in Vietnam, I volunteered for military service and spent a year in Southeast Asia.

I served because my father and grandfather went before me.

I served so that I can now claim the cumulative value of my family’s sacrifices for this country to demand that this 400th anniversary of America’s original sin marks a new beginning.

I served so that my grandchildren won’t have to risk their lives for a pipe dream of racial equality.

DeWayne Wickham, a retired USA TODAY columnist, is dean of the School of Global Journalism & Communication at Morgan State University in Baltimore. Follow him on Twitter: @DeWayneWickham