The White Lion was an English privateer operating under a Dutch letter of marque which brought the first Africans to the English colony of Virginia in 1619, a year before the arrival of the Mayflower in New England. Though the African captives were sold as indentured servants, the event is regarded as the start of African slavery in the colonial history of the United States.

The first Africans in Virginia were a group of "twenty and odd" captive persons originally from modern-day Angola who landed at Old Point Comfort in Hampton, Virginia in late August 1619. Their arrival is seen as a beginning of the history of slavery in Virginia and British colonies in North America, although they were not in chattel slavery as it would develop in the United States, but were sold as indentured servants and had mostly worked off their indentures and were free by 1630. These colonies would go on to secede and become the United States in 1776. The landing of these captive Africans is also seen as a starting point for African-American history, given that they were the first such group in mainland British America.