Agenda says 400 years up, uses Acts 7

Acts 7: 6-7: [6] And God spake on this wise, That his seed should sojourn in a strange land; and that they should bring them into bondage, and entreat them evil four hundred years.

[7] And the nation to whom they shall be in bondage will I judge, said God: and after that shall they come forth, and serve me in this place.

CNN political analyst Kirsten Powers, formerly of FOX News, writes in her USA Today column published yesterday: "You reap what you sow, the Bible warns. Have we ever. America is amidst an overdue reckoning for the systemic racism that has been a  fundamental feature of our culture for 400 years. President Abraham Lincoln seemed to cast slavery as America's original sin, and in his second inaugural address acknowledged that if 'all the wealth piled by the bond man's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk,' that would be a fair judgment on the United States . . .

"America has failed to atone for this original sin while committing myriad others against people of color. Now it feels like the world is spiraling out of control. We are experiencing the effects of ignoring, minimizing and rationalizing sin. If you are uncomfortable with the word sin, just use the word evil in its place. We have allowed evil to flourish."

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"The First Africans in Virginia Landed in 1619," was the headline in TIME Magazine last year in an article commemorating the 400th anniversary of the American slave trade landmark. "The human cargo that arrived in Virginia in 1619 had come from the port city of Luanda, now the capital of present-day Angola. Back then, it was a Portuguese colony, and most of the enslaved are believed to have been captured during an ongoing war between Portugal and the kingdom of Ndongo, as John Thornton wrote in the The William and Mary Quarterly in 1998. Between 1618 and 1620, about 50,000 enslaved people — many of whom had been prisoners of war — were exported from Angola. An estimated 350 of these captives were loaded onto a Portuguese slave ship called the São João Bautista (more commonly known as the San Juan Batista)."

"The 400 Years of Silence" is the name given to the period of time between the last of the Old Testament prophets and the arrival of Jesus in the New Testament. 

This is how the New York Times sees 400 years of silence--based on the slave trade coming to America in 1619, that is:

"Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, its diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day. The seeds of all that were planted long before our official birth date, in 1776, when the men known as our founders formally declared independence from Britain . . . The goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year. Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country."

(new article tomorrow)