KEY WEST COMMEMORATION UNITES MANY THREADS FOR THE FUTURE

Few historic commemorations bring together as many powerful, empowering, and providential connections as this year’s Annual South Florida Community Observance of the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and Its Abolition in Key West, Florida, on Sunday, August 25, 2019, from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. at Cornish Memorial AME Zion Church Fellowship Hall, and from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. at Key West African Cemetery, the historic site where 295 young people, rescued from three captured slave ships brought into the southernmost city in 1860 were buried through the community’s generosity, having been unable to survive the traumas of the ocean crossing.

While this yearly tradition in Key West, honoring the strength and memory of all who endured the unspeakable horrors of slave ships, is more than a decade old, this year’s Remembrance is made more meaningful than ever by the milestone 400th anniversary of the fateful arrival, “about the latter end of August,” 1619, of the first “20 and odd” captive Africans to come into British-occupied Native North America, marking the effective beginning of 246 years of legal “race”-based chattel slavery in the United States and its continuing aftermath, which has called for the proclamation of August 25 as a National Day of Healing, culminating with a Nationwide Bell Ringing Ceremony for four minutes beginning at 3:00 p.m., Eastern Daylight Time.

Global Connections

This national Quadricentennial commemoration at Fort Monroe, in Hampton, Virginia (on the site of those first Africans’ landing) and in communities around the United States is also being observed internationally, by African governments and most notably by an NAACP-organized pilgrimage to Ghana, West Africa, a nation which has been in the forefront of welcoming African descendants “back home” from the Diaspora, with other groups organizing similar visits.

By yet another fortuitous coincidence, this international observance coincides with the 25th anniversary of the 1994 launch of UNESCO Slave Route Project (SRP), in Benin. West Africa, as a global call to all UN member nations that were touched by this egregious history of human trafficking to identify and conserve all related historic sites, artifacts, archival records, oral memories and other evidence, so that the story will not be lost of forgotten by future generations.

The International Day being observed in Key West and around the world is actually August 23, designated by the SRP to commemorate still another anniversary, that of the beginning of the world-changing Haitian Revolution in 1791, which would produce the world’s first Black republic, and become a beacon of hope and support for enslaved populations and freedom-seekers throughout the hemisphere, while forcing a defeated Napoleon, with the loss of his richest colony, to sell the vast Louisiana territory in North America to the United States in 1803, doubling the size of the nation at the time.

The Slave Route Project is now playing a history-making role in the US with the official designation of “Sites of Memory,” bringing global recognition to no less than 42 of the 52 known ports of entry of forcibly imported Africans which have been identified by the Jacksonville-based Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Markers Project, among others, with more to come, including prospective designations in Key West and the Florida Keys.

A Centennial Not to be Forgotten

It  cannot go without notice that all of these interconnected anniversaries related to slavery come in     the 100th anniversary year of one of the most deadly direct consequences of 1619, which was the “Red Summer” year of the 1919 rash of at least 39 “race riots” – a peak period in violent racist mob attacks on Black communities in cities around the nation, which erupted in response to supposed competition for jobs and housing, and the demands of Black soldiers returning from World War I for the equality, justice, and freedom that they fought to defend in foreign nations overseas.

This violence in 1919 was in effect a 20th century renewal of the murderous post-Reconstruction White Supremacist terrorism that followed the Civil War, and would include such previous cases as the 1917 East St. Louis riot and subsequent ones like those in Ocoee and Rosewood, Florida, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the early 1920s — a bloody sacrifice of hundreds of lives not to be forgotten, nor should the fact that it also gave rise to groups of defenders like the African Blood Brothers (ABB), without whom the losses would have been even greater.

Finally, all of the above commemorations are unfolding during the International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024), declared by the UN General Assembly with the theme of “Recognition, Justice, Development,” as a continuation of the work begun by the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa (from which the US and Israeli delegations “walked out”), which concluded only twelve days before the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, and has therefore been very much overshadowed in American news coverage.

A New Day

In this light it is a most significant development that the great present – and future – significance of the totality of this history, and more, is being diligently brought to greater awareness and explored in depth by news coverage such as a series of articles in the Washington Post and a highly acclaimed current “1619 Project” initiated by the New York Times with a growing collection of insightful articles on many aspects of America’s slavery legacy.

This is a promising beginning of new and overdue approaches to studying this long-neglected history that has made us who we are, which will bring much more information to light through the much-needed African and Native American perspectives, and be more broadly “popularized,” partly by being connected to such vital issues as the revival of the Poor People’s Campaign and environmental concerns.

Admission to the Key West event is free and open to the public. For further information, call 305-905-7620 or visit the Florida Black Historical Research Project web site at fbhrpinc.org.

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