|
For Immediate Release
March 24, 2008
United Nations Hosts Freedom Schooner Amistad
International Video Simulcast
More than 100
Connecticut Students will attend the
United Nations live video-conference Friday, March 28th with Students from
Canada,
England,
Sierra Leone,
Cape Verde,
St. Lucia, and
Norway
The crew of Freedom Schooner Amistad will join the conference via satellite from sea
as it makes its transatlantic crossing from
West Africa
Commemorating the 200th Anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
On
Friday, March 28th, 2008 the crew of replica
U.S. schooner Amistad will join in a live international video-conference at the United Nations. The video-conference will link students from several ports the Freedom Schooner Amistad has visited over the past year in order to conduct an international youth forum on the meaning of the abolition of the slave trade. The event is part of a week-long program creating the first annual worldwide commemoration of the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The Amistad traveling exhibit will be open at UN headquarters in
New York City until
April 23rd, 2008.
The Freedom Schooner Amistad, currently at the midpoint in a 14-month commemorative voyage, has been formally recognized by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as the official
United States representative for the year commemorating the 200th Anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807.
The voyage, which is being called the Atlantic Freedom Tour, has also garnered the endorsement of UNESCO’s Slave Trade Route Project; The Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, in New York City; the Museum of the Atlantic, Halifax, Nova Scotia; The Black Loyalist Society of Nova Scotia; and numerous other historians and scholars currently focused on the history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
The live video-conference will link the students from the ports that the Amistad has visited during its historic tour, including
Halifax,
Nova Scotia;
Bristol,
England;
Freetown,
Sierra Leone; and
Praia,
Cape Verde. The students will perform poetry, music, and interact with the crew of the Amistad, as the schooner transits the infamous Middle Passage hundreds of miles out on the
Atlantic Ocean. The event will seek to honor those lives broken or lost in the transatlantic slave trade. Students from schools in
New Haven,
New London, and Old Saybrook will attend.
The video-conference will begin at
9:30 AM, March 28th from UN headquarters and will be streamed live on the United Nations’ education outreach website: www.Cyberschoolbus.un.org.
For more information of Amistad’s tour: www.amistadamerica.org
________________________________________________________________________
The Amistad Story
In 1839, 53 Africans were kidnapped from
West Africa and sold into the transatlantic slave trade. Shackled aboard the Portuguese slave vessel, Tecora, 49 men and 4 children were brought to
Havana,
Cuba, where they were fraudulently classified as native, Cuban-born slaves. Purchased illegally by Spanish planters, Jose Ruiz and Pedro Montez, they were transferred to the schooner, La Amistad for transport to another part of the island. Three days into the journey, led by a 25-year-old Mende rice farmer named Sengbe Pieh, or “Cinque” to his Spanish captors, the Africans seized the ship, killed the captain and the cook, and ordered the planters to sail to
Africa. After 63 days, La Amistad and her “cargo” were seized as salvage by the USS Washington near
Montauk Point,
Long Island, NY, and towed to
New London harbor in
Connecticut. The Africans were held in a
New Haven jail on charges of murder. The case took on historic proportions when former President John Quincy Adams successfully argued before the United States Supreme Court on behalf of the captives. In 1841, the 35 surviving Africans were returned to
Africa.
________________________________________________________________________
 |
