The Church of St. Mark in Brooklyn, New York was originally established by a group of black Episcopalians in 1838. The next year, Dr. Samuel M. Haskins was asked to be rector (pastor), the role he would maintain for 60 years. By April 1841 the … Read MoreThe Church of St. Mark, Brooklyn, New York (1838- )
On Christmas Day, 1837, during the Second Seminole War, the Africans and Native Americans comprising Florida’s Seminole Nation defeated a superior U.S. fighting force. In more than half a century of Florida invasions, this was the worst defeat the Seminole Nation inflicted on the American … Read MoreBattle of Lake Okeechobee (1837)
In the essay below, Bruce L. Mouser, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, describes the conflicting goals of African Creoles, African Americans, and British and American colonizationists in the fate of the Rio Pongo Valley along the West Coast of Africa. … Read MoreAfricans, African Americans, Great Britain and the United States: The Curious History of the Rio Pongo in the Early 19th Century
Image Ownership: Public Domain In the article below Hilary Burrage, Executive Chair of the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Foundation, a United Kingdom (UK)-based non-profit organisation, describes the composer and how she came to regard and preserve his work and legacy. It has taken three times the … Read MoreSamuel Coleridge-Taylor: For His Times and Ours
Liberian Women’s Peace Group Image Ownership: Pewee Flomoku The Mano River Women’s Peace Network (MARWOPNET) was one of the first female led peace negotiating teams in the region of West Africa and they organized a system of diplomacy between the Liberian, Guinean and Sierra Leonean … Read MoreThe Mano River Women’s Peace Network (2001-)
Alan Gilbert, University of Denver political scientist and anti-racist activist, is the author of Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence, one of the few works that examines the free and enslaved blacks who joined the American Patriots and the … Read MoreFighting for Freedom on Both Sides of the American Revolution
Freetown is the capital, principal port, commercial center, and largest city of Sierra Leone. The city was founded by British Naval Lieutenant John Clarkson and freed American slaves from Nova Scotia. Freetown was part of the larger colony of the Sierra Leone which was founded … Read MoreFreetown, Sierra Leone (1792- )
Boston King, one of the pioneer settlers of Sierra Leone, was born enslaved on the Richard Waring plantation near Charleston, South Carolina around 1760. Through the age of 16, King was trained as a house servant before being sent to apprentice as a carpenter in … Read MoreBoston King (c. 1760-1802)
Born in Africa and enslaved in America, Thomas Peters is best known for his influence in settling Canadian blacks in the African colony of Sierra Leone. The earliest documentation of Peters’ life is as a 38-year-old slave in North Carolina. When the Revolutionary War began … Read MoreThomas Peters (1738-1792)
Early African independence advocate Herbert Macauley was born in Lagos, Nigeria on November 14, 1864. His father was the founder and first principal of the Church Missionary Society Grammar School in Lagos, and his mother was a daughter of the Reverend Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the … Read MoreHerbert Macauley (1864-1946)
