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Article

Apprenticeship in the British Caribbean  

Alonford James Robinson

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

In 1807 the British Parliament voted to end British participation in the international slave trade. In 1834 it ended slavery entirely, promising freedom to more than a million slaves in the Caribbean. In an effort to soften the effects of emancipation on white slaveholders, the British Parliament decided to implement a program known as apprenticeship. Under this program all slaves under six years of age, and those born after August 1, 1834, were freed. But praedials (fieldworkers) were required to work for their current owners for a period of six years, and nonpraedials for a period of four years. After this period all slaves would be emancipated.

The apprenticeship program was so overloaded with rules and restrictions that special magistrates had to be appointed to monitor the system Slaves worked forty hours per week in exchange for food clothing and shelter They were permitted to spend their remaining time ...

Article

Baquaqua, Mohammah  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Mohammah Baquaqua was born in 1824 in Zoogoo, (probably a small village in present-day Angola) in central Africa, to a fairly prosperous family. He was raised in an Islamic household and was sent by his father to the local mosque to study the Qur'an (Koran), the sacred text central to Islamic worship. Unsatisfied with school, he left to learn the trade of making needles and knives with his uncle in another village. Baquaqua was captured and enslaved after a struggle for the succession of the local throne. His brother managed to find someone who was able to purchase Baquaqua's freedom. Baquaqua returned to his hometown and became a bodyguard to the local king, where he noted the corruption of the royal armed forces that looted the citizens of the city.

A group of individuals apparently envious of his close association with the king engineered Baquaqua s capture and ...

Article

Bassett, Ebenezer Don Carlos  

Adam W. Green

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 May 2018

was the second of three children born to two freed slaves, Eben Tobias, a farmer, and Susan Gregory, a mixed-race Pequot Indian, in Derby, Connecticut. An education proponent and political activist, Bassett became America's first black diplomat when he served as Resident Minister in Haiti for eight years, helping pave the way for those seeking opportunities in international diplomacy and public service.

Along with his mixed race birth and royal lineage that his family claimed from Africa Bassett whose surname came from a generous white family close to his grandfather s former owners also had elected office in his blood His grandfather Tobiah who won his freedom after fighting in the American Revolution had been elected a Black Governor as had Bassett s father Eben The largely nominal honorific was bestowed upon respected men in various locales via Election Days sometimes by a voice vote these Black Governors ...

Article

Blacks and the Military in Latin America and the Caribbean  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Over the course of United States history, black soldiers have periodically been praised for the skill and courage they exhibited in war. More recently, as the United States has reexamined the role of blacks in war, appreciation for black soldiers' determination to defend their country has deepened. Yet there is still a legacy of black soldiering that is largely unknown—the role of black soldiers in virtually every military conflict of the Americas from Columbus to the present.

Few people know, for example, that Spanish conquistador Francisco de Montejo appointed a black military aide in the sixteenth century to lead an expedition to subdue an Indian village. In 1542 Montejo conquered Yucatán, a state in south-eastern Mexico The Mexican episode is just one early example of many similar conflicts in which blacks played a major role Some of the black soldiers fought for months but others fought for years The ...

Article

Bonilla family  

Trevor Hall

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 January 2018

a free black Spanish family who lived in Seville in the early sixteenth century and migrated to the Spanish Caribbean in 1515 The family was composed of a mother father and two children whose first names are not recorded While Spanish documents recorded nothing about the father s profession the Bonilla family had enough money to pay the passage for four to sail to the Americas Most Spaniards who sailed to the Caribbean in the early sixteenth century also transported European manufactured goods food and even livestock all in high demand among Spanish colonists in the Americas Nothing is known of the Bonilla s transatlantic crossing however at that time most ships sailed from Seville to the Spanish Canary Islands and then navigated southwest to Hispaniola modern day Haiti and the Dominican Republic Despite the scarcity of information about this family the Bonillas were part of the broader migration ...

Article

Cafundó  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Cafundó is a rural community outside of the heavily urbanized metropolitan area of São Paulo, Brazil, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the city of Sorocaba. Only about seventy people live in the hamlet of ten or so mud-and-straw houses. The people of Cafundó mostly cultivate rice, beans, and corn, which they supplement through hunting or working as agricultural laborers on nearby large farms.

According to the oral history of Cafundó, the people moved onto land in the area in the mid-1860s, when a local slave owner willed to two of his African slaves, Antonia and Ifigênia, their freedom as well as several hectares of land. Although all of Cafundó's modern inhabitants claim descent from Antonia and Ifigênia, the inhabitants are split into two groups bearing little resemblance to one another. One group is distinctly Afro-Brazilian, while the other appears to be caboclo a term used to ...

Article

Europe  

Leyla Keough

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Europe, lying just across the Mediterranean Sea from North Africa, has had a complex relationship with the African continent and its people. Europeans began the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the sixteenth century. They also explored and colonized Africa, much of which remained under European control until the twentieth century. Africans, however, have also traveled to Europe. During the early modern era, most blacks in Europe were slaves or paid servants, but a few became artists and scholars. During the early twentieth century, Africans and people of African descent living in Europe experienced remarkable intellectual, political, and artistic stirrings that led to influential movements such as Pan-Africanism and Négritude. Since the 1950s, a wave of black immigration has transformed many European nations and given rise to a new population of Afro-Europeans.

Article

Freeman, Martin Henry  

Russell W. Irvine

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

educator and emigrationist, was born in bucolic Rutland, Vermont. Freeman's life can be divided into two periods: his thirty-seven-year residence in America and his twenty-five-year stay in Liberia, Africa. In Rutland, he attended the predominantly white East Parish Congregational Church, whose pastor recognized Freeman's precocity and volunteered to prepare him for college. Freeman was accepted into Middlebury College and graduated class salutatorian in 1849. He taught briefly in Boston before accepting an invitation to join the faculty of the newly established Allegheny Institute and Mission Church (later Avery College) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1850. Freeman's appointment at the first state-chartered degree-granting institution for blacks distinguished him as the first college-educated black professor in America. In recognition of his advanced study in mathematics and natural philosophy, Middlebury College voted to award him an M.A. degree in 1852. In 1856 when Avery College s first white president ...

Article

Garrido, João  

Trevor Hall

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 January 2018

an enslaved West African who lived in Portugal and worked as a translator and mariner aboard Portuguese ships trading in West Africa. He appears in the historical record in 1477, during a war between Portugal and Spain (1475–1479) when he escaped his Portuguese master, who had taken him from Portugal to West Africa many times as a translator aboard Portuguese trading vessels. But on what proved to be his last voyage, Garrido escaped and remained in the region of Guinea in West Africa. It was there that he wrote Prince João, the future King João II (r. 1481–1495) of Portugal, requesting his freedom. Because Garrido was then resident in Africa, his request was granted.

In his 1477 letter to Prince João Garrido stated that he was a Christian who had been enslaved in Lagos southern Portugal by the squire Gonçalo Toscano The African informed the ...

Article

Goncalvez, Caterina  

Trevor Hall

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 January 2018

a free black female merchant who lived in the Spanish Canary Islands, off the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Nothing is known about her family life, but Goncalvez appears in the historical record in 1515, the year she boarded a ship and transported her merchandise from the Canary Islands to the Portuguese Cape Verde Islands. Seventeen years earlier in 1498 Christopher Columbus had sailed from the Canary Islands to the Cape Verdes in only nine days. Her Spanish name, Goncalvez, identifies her as a Christian. Her Atlantic trading expedition provides information about a little known and sparsely documented maritime trade between Spanish colonists in the Canary Islands and Portuguese colonists in the Cape Verde Islands during the early sixteenth century. Few documents written in Spain and Portugal at this time describe the maritime commerce between the two archipelagos.

According to a Cape Verde customs receipt book for 1513–1516 on ...

Article

Green, Samuel, Jr.  

Shirl Benikosky

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
30 September 2012

former slave, abolitionist, and blacksmith, was born Samuel Green Jr. to Samuel Green and Catherine (Kitty) Green of Dorchester County, Maryland. Although born into slavery, Green's father served as a Methodist exhorter (lay preacher), farmed, and acted as an agent for the Underground Railroad and Philadelphia Vigilance Committee. The 1830 census data of Dorchester County reveals that separate individuals owned Green s parents Green s mother is listed as the head of a household with three other slaves and a male slave of the elder Samuel Green s age is listed under the household of his owner Henry Nicols Hence when the younger Green was born he and his mother lived in a household separate from his father Slave owners considered slaves as chattel much like farm animals Consequently in the census data reports slaves were inventoried as male or female with an approximate age and rarely by name ...

Article

Holt Decision  

Leyla Keough

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

In Smith v. Gould (1706), Lord Chief Justice John Holt freed a black slave from his West Indian owner, concluding that “common law takes no notice of Negroes being different from other men. By the common law no man can have property in another … as soon as a Negro comes into England, he becomes free: one may be a villain [a serf] in England, but not a Slave.” These comments became an important precedent in the eighteenth-century battle against slavery in England. This case, which became known as the Holt Decision, posited one solution to a legal predicament that had faced Great Britain since its involvement in slavery: Did slaves who were brought to England by West Indian planters remain the property of those slaveholders? Or did these slaves become free upon entering England, which was generally upheld as a free land?

In the absence of parliamentary ...

Article

James Somerset Case  

Leyla Keough

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

According to James Walvin, scholar of English slavery, the case of James Somerset (The King v. James Somerset) was “England's most famous slave case.” It was the culmination of the legal battle of Granville Sharp, a white English abolitionist, against slavery, and it came to be known as the case that freed slaves in Great Britain. Actually, the Somerset case was just the beginning; it took over sixty more years for the English to outlaw slavery and emancipate the slaves in the British Empire.

James Somerset was bought by Charles Stewart in Virginia; in October 1769 he was taken to England, where two years later, in October of 1771, Somerset ran away. Furious, Stewart recaptured Somerset in November 1771 and placed him on board the ship Ann and Mary under the protection of Captain John Knowles, who was to take Somerset to Jamaica ...

Article

Latin America and the Caribbean, Blacks in  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

The Latin American and Caribbean regions were the first areas of the Americas to be populated by African immigrants. African immigration to the Americas may have begun before European exploration of the region. Blacks sailed with Christopher Columbus even on his first voyage in 1492, and the earliest Spanish and Portuguese explorers were likewise accompanied by black Africans who had been born and raised in Iberia. In the following four centuries, millions of immigrants from Africa were brought to the New World as slaves. Today, their descendants form significant ethnic minorities in several Latin American countries, and they are the dominant element in many of the Caribbean nations. Over the centuries, black people have added their original contributions to the cultural mix of their respective societies and thus exerted a profound influence on all facets of life in Latin America.

Article

Patronato  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Article

Race in Latin America  

Pedro Pérez-Sarduy and Jean Stubbs

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Millions of Africans of different ethnic groupings were shipped halfway across the world to labor the Sugar, coffee, tobacco, and rice plantations and the mines of the New World. They brought with them their religions, their languages, their dance, their music, and their instruments. European colonial masters did their utmost to strip these Africans of their freedom, their dignity, and their culture, but culture was perhaps the easiest of the three for peoples of African descent to continue to subvert.

From the United States South and the Mexican altiplano in the north, to the Peruvian coastal lowlands and the Argentine pampas down south, the rhythms of Africa continued to beat. The Samba and Candomblé of Brazil; the Son and Santería of Cuba; the street Carnivals of Salvador de Bahia, Rio De Janeiro, and a host of other towns and cities; the merengue of the Dominican Republic ...

Article

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil  

Michelle Gueraldi

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Located on the southeastern coast of Brazil Rio de Janeiro s name comes from Portuguese and means river of January a reference to its location near the entrance to Gaunabara Bay Sixteenth century Portuguese explorers believed the bay to be a large estuary a water passage where the tide meets a river current Today Rio de Janeiro is informally divided into four distinct areas The downtown which includes the port is the center of commerce The South Zone south of downtown includes the largely middle and upper class beachside neighborhoods of Copacabana Leblon and Ipanema as well as middle class neighborhoods closer to downtown Hillside favelas squatter settlements or shantytowns in the South Zone such as Rocinha the largest favela in Brazil give poor and working class residents easy access to work in nearby middle class neighborhoods and tourist districts The North Zone is the site of most of ...

Article

Role of Slaves in Abolition and Emancipation in Latin America and the Caribbean  

Rafael Diaz-Diaz

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

In light of the complex process of deferral, legal disregard, and noncompliance with international treaties that characterized the abolition movement, slaves' own pursuit of emancipation became decisive. In other words, slave resistance, in the context of the abolitionist phenomenon, developed into the principal means by which the abolition of slavery would be hastened, bit by bit, from the bottom up. The cases of Brazil, Cuba, Haiti and Jamaica are perhaps the most representative. Violent protests and revolts, collective escapes, individual reactions, presumed submission, destruction of property, cane fields set alight: all figure among the actions slaves took to gain their freedom.

In this sense enslaved men and women cannot be said to have been simple spectators or passive subjects who would leave the determination of their freedom in the hands of the slaveholding elite To imagine for instance that the news laws incidents and arguments common to an ...

Article

Said, Mohammed Ali Ben (Nicholas Said)  

David Childs

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
30 September 2012

slave, teacher, world traveler, and Union soldier in the U.S. Civil War, was born in Kouka, the capital of Bornu. Said was his mother's ninth child; all told, he had eighteen siblings. In the early nineteenth century, Bornu (spelled Bornou in Said's narrative) was a kingdom that was home to the Kanuri people of north-central Africa. His father, Barca Gana, born into a prominent Muslim family, was the eldest son of the ruling chief of Molgoy. A military man, he was a highly valued lieutenant of the King of Bornu. Said's mother also came from a prominent family: she was the daughter of a Mandra chief. Said's family owned several slaves.

Nicholas spent much of his childhood studying Islam and in formal schooling He learned to read and write in both his native tongue and Arabic He also had a great passion for hunting and often persuaded his friends ...

Article

Saint Kitts and Nevis  

Lisa Clayton Robinson

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Few of the nearly 85,000 tourists who flock to the beaches of Saint Kitts and Nevis each year probably know that the country has been at the forefront of so many different trends in Caribbean history. For example, Saint Kitts was the first settled British colony, Nevis was once universally regarded as the “Queen of the Caribbees” for its success at Sugar cultivation, and Saint Kitts's workers helped begin the labor movements that eventually brought self-government to the black majorities across the Caribbean. Although it is a small state, Saint Kitts and Nevis has taken the lead in some of the most important movements in the region.