Now the sisters, descendants of black Loyalists, are hoping people across the province will brush up on the landing as the celebration of Black Loyalist 225 kicks off today.

"It is a history a lot of people don’t know about, especially the black Loyalist (descendants) themselves," Nina Cox, 19, said Monday at a news conference in Halifax.

"The past year or two, three years, I’ve really grown to be connected to my roots."

More than 3,000 black Loyalists came to Nova Scotia after the American Revolution, slaves lured by promises of freedom and Crown land if they fled their masters. The largest group of them — 2,500 — ended up in Birchtown, according to the Black Loyalist Heritage Society’s website.

But many of them didn’t get the land the British promised, or if they did, it was often unsuitable for farming. Some were forced to work for extremely low wages or even become slaves again.

Hundreds left Nova Scotia in the next decade for Sierra Leone, where they helped establish Freetown, now the West African country’s capital.

Ms. Cox and her sister both said they learned about their roots while working at the Black Loyalist Museum in Birchtown. Their interest in their history led them to stints aboard the Freedom Schooner Amistad, which has been in Halifax as part of a journey retracing a 19th-century slave trade route. The Amistad heads to Shelburne next week.

It’s a recreation of the Spanish ship La Amistad, which became famous in 1839 after 53 Africans were kidnapped from West Africa and taken to Cuba. They rose up and took control of the ship, but the U.S. navy seized it off the coast of New York about two months later.

It was taken to Connecticut, where the Africans were charged with mutiny and murder. John Quincy Adams, who had earlier served as U.S. president, successfully argued their case before the United States Supreme Court and, in 1841, 35 survivors were returned to Africa.

Black Loyalist 225 also features the one-woman play A New Hope, performed by actress and singer Shelley Hamilton, a Cherry Brook native, now based in Toronto, and also a black Loyalist descendant.

In it, Ms. Hamilton shares the true story of slave Lydia Jackson. It’s a reprise of the role she played 25 years ago in a high school play called Freedom, which garnered national recognition.

The play features a song Ms. Hamilton said she learned from her great-great-great-grandfather, through material archived by Helen Creighton, who interviewed him more than 60 years ago. Ms. Hamilton said he recounts that he learned the song from his father, who was a slave.

"It’s very emotional for him. It’s emotional for me to hear that emotion and to talk about it," Ms. Hamilton said.

Ms. Hamilton is scheduled to perform the play in both Halifax and Shelburne.

Read the original article published in The Chronicle Herald - Nova Scotia on July 29th, 2008