MS01.03.03.B01.F02.0005
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AFRO-AMERICAN ART CARAVAN
Background
In the summer of 1839, "Rumors raced along the coast, growing
from mouth to mouth, added to by every teller, spread by newsmen
whose imagination had been kindled by the sound of mystery and danger.
Some said she was a pirate schooner bent on looting lonely coastal vessels
and towns. Some swore she was the Flying Dutchman beating her
way through the seven seas. Others identified her correctly as the
Spanish slaver whose cargo had risen and killed the captain and crew.
Word of such a mutiny had come from Nuevitas in the island of Cuba —
word that twenty-six whites had perished at the hands of the black cannibals
on board . . . . Her master was an African named Cinque and
her destination the slave coast, from which he had lately been stolen . . .
but the wanderings of both master and schooner were stranger than
mind could imagine, their effect on the institution of slavery greater
than words could measure."
Myths about our thirty year anti-slavery struggle suffice for
us, and yet the truism that truth is stranger than fiction was never so
apt as in the case of the Amistad mutiny.
The lithograph of Cinque by John Sheffield published in the
"New London Gazette" in August 1839 helped make it impossible to ignore
the humanity of the stolen [underlined] Mendis [/underlined] and must
have been a decisive factor
as John Quincy Adams argued before the United States Supreme Court
that Cinque and his people were indeed human and not cargo to be
returned to the jurisdiction of Her Majesty the Queen of Spain. No doubt
it was the artist’s stroke which gave eloquent advocacy to Cinque’s
human dignity and played a fundamental role in the movement to better
the life of the American Negro.
Although the incident has been forgotten largely except to
scholars, reverberations from the Amistad mutiny still affect the lives
of all Americans and, especially, those of African descent. The
establishment of a large number of American Negro colleges can be
directly traced to that event.
Over the years these schools have been given superb and highly
valuable works of art and documents—among them the Stieglietz
Collection of art works at Fisk University and the Amistad File of
historical documents at Dillard University. The art collection at
Tougaloo College, for example, is one of the finest collections in the
state of Mississippi, and yet it fails to have the impact such a
collection warrents.
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