Encompassing Amistad: The African American Struggle for Citizenship, 1770-1850

FAIN: BH-50174-07

Architecture Resource Center (New Haven, CT 06511-4701)
Anna M. Sanko (Project Director: March 2006 to May 2017)

Two one-week workshops for eighty school teachers to study the history of New England slavery at sites throughout Connecticut.

This workshop explores a range of sites in Connecticut to show how the African American struggle for liberty and equality is at the core, rather than the periphery, of such fundamental themes of the American experience as liberty, democracy, and equal justice. The Amistad incident marks a turning point in the antislavery movement and development of Connecticut's African American community, generating a new appreciation for Africa as well as a new realization that the institutions of American democracy could successfully be employed to advance the cause of freedom and equality for blacks. The decade that followed witnessed a flowering of black civic and religious institutions in Connecticut and the North resulting in a state of organization that crucially influenced white public opinion and paved the way both for the tremendous Northern commitment to the Civil War and to political transformations--including the Reconstruction ammendments to the Constitution--that followed.