400 years on, Mayflower's legacy includes pride, prejudice

PLYMOUTH, Mass. (AP) — Four centuries after white Europeans stepped off the Mayflower and onto America’s shores, some descendants of the colonists are wrestling with the complicated legacy of their ancestors amid a global racial reckoning.

There is immense pride among those who can trace their families back to the passengers who boarded the ship in Plymouth, England, in 1620 to flee religious persecution and realize a better life. Yet for some, the devastating impact that the Pilgrims' landing in New England had on Native Americans weighs heavily in this moment of unrest over systemic racism.

In interviews with The Associated Press, Americans and Britons who can trace their ancestry either to the Pilgrims or the Indigenous people who helped them survive talked openly about the need in 2020 to fairly tell the history.

“Considering my ancestors helped incite the racial hierarchies that caused the need for these movements now, I do feel ashamed that that had to be part of history," said Olivia Musoke, 19, whose ancestor on her mother's side arrived in America on the Mayflower.

Musoke, whose father is Black, said the pride she feels in coming from people who helped settle this country “gets diminished by the role they played in kind of manipulating and terrorizing people of color, which trickled down to the structures we have today.”

For some, it's a difficult issue to reconcile.

“The pilgrims came out of religious persecution in England. And I’m very proud of the fact that they set off to create their own independent culture,” said Seth Howland Handy, 53, another descendant of a Mayflower passenger. “But they came to a place where there was existing culture. And, you know, the history is not friendly and that is troublesome,” he said.

Handy said it's...