Allan Appel Photo
Amistad essay contest winner Tessa Rock and New Haven Corporation Counsel John Rose discuss the case.
You can draw a direct line between the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement today and the story of the Amistad captives of 175 years ago: While the legal system grinds away toward justice, you and your allies absolutely must, at the same time, be energetic advocates for yourselves and your cause.
That’s where the Amistad Committee, itself formed 175 years ago to help as the legal defense in the case, drew more than 200 guests and supporters to mark the 175th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision freeing the Amistad captives who revolved on a slave ship, then were held in New Haven.
The event took Wednesday night at Amarante’s Sea Cliff in Morris Cove.
The Amistad case is considered the first civil-rights legal victory in U.S. history.
“The captives were always advocating for themselves, not just relying on the legal system,” wrote Tessa Rock, a New London high school 10th grader and a first-place winner in the statewide essay contest that was one of the features of the celebration.
Before the dinner got underway, she was there discussing the Amistad story along with the city’s representative at the event, New Haven Corporation Counsel John Rose. The legal case was “ridiculously complex,” he said.
“High we exalt thee, realm of the free,” goes the first line of the Sierra Leone national anthem, which attendees also sang.
Rose also pointed out to her that the judge in charge of the initial Amistad trial was the very same who, just six years before, in 1833, had ordered imprisonment for Prudence Crandall for opening her school in Canterbury, Ct. to an African-American girl. Her violation of the law: in effect creating the first integrated school classroom in the United States.
People in 1839 expected in the beginning a bad result, and that was part of the motivating fervor of the movement of religious abolitonists who began to organize the Amistad prisoners’ defense team in the form of the Amistad Committee.
Two flags, bread, and the intense gaze of an Amistad captive, out of the past, through art.
Also at the table of honor in front of the flower-bedecked dining room was long-time Amistad Committee President Al Marder, along with Ed Hamilton, the sculptor of the Amistad memorial statue adjacent to City Hall (the statue is precisely on the site where the captives were initially held in 1839); and Mrs. Isha Sillah, the head of chancery for the Sierra Leone embassy in Washington, D.C.
The Amistad captives of 1839 hailed from Sierra Leone, which was then a British colony.
In addition to a quick course through that history, Sillah thanked the Amistad Committee, in partnership with the Sisters Cities program in New Haven, for providing Sierra Leone with funds and ambulances to combat the recent Ebola crisis.
Event organizer Hamilton and her neighbor Everton Chambers, one of 200 attendees.
When she said “Sierra Leone is now Ebola free,” applause crescendoed across the room.
Stemming from the continuing relationship between New Haven and Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, the whole event percolated with a sense that past is present. Each of the tables had as a centerpiece the flags of both the United States and Sierra Leone, along with a facsimile of a drawing of Cinque, Margu, or another of the Amistad prisoners as they awaited trial in 1839.
They were sketched by a 17-year-old New Havener named William Townsend, said Ros Hamilton.
Hamilton, vice president of the Amistad Committee, along with Kai Perry of the program committee, were the chief organizers of the event.
The essay winner and her proud parents, Mamie and Paul Rock.
Of the need for continuing advocacy for civil rights, Hamilton pointed out that when former president John Quincy Adams spoke at length and eloquently to the Supreme Court in making his case for the Africans’ freedom, “everyone thought it was the beginning of abolition” of slavery in the country.
But no, it was just for those people, she added.
“We connect it to the Black Lives Matter movement. That’s what happened then,” she said, citing the involvement of the churches as key players in advocacy during and after the Amistad trials.
Perry, who serves on the Amistad Committee board.
Perry, who was busy passing out copies of the essays of Tessa Rock and the other prize winners — Geranne Darbouze of Central High School and Jason A. Spencer of Warren Harding High School in Bridgeport — made this point about the significance of the Amistad story for young people: “They need to understand that it happened in their backyard. A lot of [the essay writers] made a connection with Black Lives Matter and with whites caring. For me it is important that they know that even though they’re young, they can make a difference.”
Other events in the citywide celebration include tonight’s 5:30 p.m. dramatic performance by Tammy Denease of the life of one of the captive girls: “Sarah Margu: A Child of the Amistad.” The location is the New Haven Museum on Whitney Avenue just north of Trumbull, and admission is free.