Mathias de Sousa: Jesuit Educated

So much of that history comes to us through scraps: a half-excavated cabin; a bill of sale; a line in a will or a church record or a chronicle. So much of that history is lost—it’s the history we so rarely see. But we know, almost at the very beginning of it, that there was a man named Mathias de Sousa.

We know that he came to America with the Jesuits (Fr. Andrew White, S.J.) in 1634 on a ship called the Ark. We know that he was a fur trader.

We know that he once owed money and paid it back. He was, we think, the first black man to cast a vote in an American assembly. And we don’t know much else. We are sure that he voted; we don’t know which way, or what he said at the time, or if he had any idea that he was the first.

He traveled with Jesuits; maybe he was a Catholic, and maybe he wasn’t. We can guess from his name that he came from Angola or the Congo; but a guess is all we have.

We have no idea what he looked like. Nine years after he comes into the record, he passes out of history again. It could be that he died; it could be that he took passage on a ship. From that point on, he is part of the history we don’t see. But the records are beyond doubt on one point: Mathias de Sousa was a free man. And he has his place in the half-seen history of millions who used their freedom to show that they were no one’s inferior, and millions more who kept their dignity even in chains, who fought and spoke up and sat in and marched until they were free. We know that astronomers have found new planets in the sky, without even seeing them—they looked for those planets’ pull on what they did see. The same power is in Mathias’s life, and the millions of half-seen lives that were as rich and purposeful as his.

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More on Mathias de Sousa (here) , (here) and (here)