A spiritual church opens in New Orleans as a legal shelter
Mother Leafy Anderson founded the Eternal Life Spiritual Church in New Orleans in 1918, the first of the Spiritual churches of that city. The form was protective. With Vodou practice…
A black emigration convention sends its own envoy to Soulouque
In the 1850s despair at the Fugitive Slave Law and at tightening restrictions across the northern states pushed black leaders to reopen a question many had closed. Boyd quotes Frederick…
Three Veracruzanas come home in the captain’s cabin of a slave ship
The San Antonio made port at Veracruz on 24 May 1687 with 580 enslaved Africans in its hold. Margarita de Robles, Paula Matias and Maria de Pares came ashore quietly…
A petition in New Amsterdam wins a freedom children cannot inherit
In February 1644 a group of enslaved Africans in New Amsterdam petitioned the Dutch authorities for their freedom. They had served the Dutch West India Company for eighteen years, they…
Rebels at Stono halt in a field to dance and drum for more recruits
On a Sunday in September 1739 some twenty enslaved men, called Angolans by the colonists and led by a man named Jemmy, broke open a store of firearms near the…
In Kongo, dancing a war dance was the phrase used for declaring war
A Jesuit report of January 1622 on a Kongo rebellion uses the word sangamento, dancing a war dance, as the ordinary expression for going to war. Seventeenth century writers in…
Separate but equal is announced on Haitian flag day
On 18 May 1896 the United States Supreme Court decided Plessy against Ferguson and made segregation lawful for the next fifty eight years. The case had been organised by the…
Maria reports that the widow who claimed to own her is held at Petit-Goave
Isabel Pacheco, a widow of mixed African descent taken at Veracruz, was being held at Petit-Goave with her two children, aged twelve and fourteen, in November 1684. Earlier that year…
An Nzima man defends a doctorate at Wittenberg
William Amo, an Nzima from the Gold Coast, was carried to Europe as a boy by the Dutch and in 1707 handed over as a present to the Duke of…
Fifty six chanters perform the history of Dahomey in public
Dahomey had no writing system in ordinary use and kept its history in the mouths of paid professionals called ahanjito. At the annual customs of 1850 the British official Frederick…