The Amistad Comes Home

Paula Mann-Agnew looked across the waters of New Haven Harbor at the 78-foot Baltimore Clipper replica of the Spanish schooner, La Amistad, docked, in all its majesty, at Long Wharf Pier.

“Sankofa,” Mann-Agnew, executive director of Discovering Amistad, told a gathering Saturday of 50 people in the cool autumn air. ​“It’s a West African concept that focuses on the fact that in order for us to move forward in a positive way, we need to look back on our history.

The event, which took place on the pier, was a celebration of The Amistad’s return to its home port in New Haven. It opened with an African drum call, followed with speeches by dignitaries and civic leaders, and concluded with musical entertainment.

It was the third and final stop on the two-month Amistad Journey to Freedom, which included stops in Hartford and Middletown. The ship is being docked on the Amistad Pier. It will be open for ship tours and dockside education this Thursday and Friday.

“That’s the story of The Amistad,” Mann-Agnew said, referring to the 1839 revolt by 53 Mende captives against their Spanish captors aboard La Amistad while being ferried to Puerto Principe, Cuba, to be sold into slavery.

Mann-Agnew said the rest of the story offers a lesson.

“These 53 Mendes who were captured in Sierra Leone and enslaved, they fought for their lives on this ship and then were imprisoned in New Haven, and they fought for their freedom through the courts,” she said. ​“It reminds us that we can stand up for ourselves but also that the journey for freedom and dismantling racism continues.”

New Haven State Rep. Toni Walker recalled the efforts waged in the State Senate to keep the replica of The Amistad, which was recreated in 2000, in New Haven.

“Every year someone else was trying to take the ship to their port, and Mayor [Toni] Harp, when she was a senator up in Hartford, she and I would say, This is our story. This happened here. Let’s share this story with our children so they understand we are going through the same struggles over and over,” she said. 

Mayor Justin Elicker sounded a similar refrain.

“The positive side of the story is that these individuals gained their freedom, and with the support of many New Haven residents,” he said, of the local abolitionists who took up their mantle in the courts.

“The ship being in our harbor is first a welcome home, and also an opportunity for us to educate each other, to reflect on our history, and to think about how far we have come since those days but much more importantly how far we need to go,” he said.

“When you see in neighborhood after neighborhood the inequality that is closely tied to race — whether it’s in housing, in our education system, in the impact that we’re all experiencing around violence — it’s clear we need to do more work to ensure that everyone truly has an opportunity to thrive,” he said.

For Charles Warner, Jr., a New Haven Public Schools educator and chairman of the Connecticut Freedom Trail, the ship ​“is a symbol of man’s inhumanity to man,” he said. ​“It’s also the story of what can happen when people come together in the spirit of justice and freedom.

“We have work to do, but with The Amistad, we have the symbol of what can be achieved,” he said.

Former Mayor Harp was among those paying tribute to outgoing Amistad Committee President Al Marder, the 99-year-old activist who led the crusade to build the replica of the Amistad during his 33-year tenure in the post.

“Those 53 were brought here to New Haven to be jailed, but there were young radicals — abolitionists — here, people who held strongly and fiercely to their faith and came together to free the enslaved,” Harp said.

“Today as we celebrate the return of The Amistad, let this story inspire us to fight for freedom as these abolitionists did, and let us remember today Al Marder and all he’s done, to keep the message of brotherhood, of friendship, alive.”

Marder himself recalled the day in 1987 that the Rev. Edwin Edmonds of Dixwell Avenue Church of Christ and the Rev. Peter Ives of the First Church of Christ on the Green asked him to take on a project to organize the 150th anniversary of the Amistad affair.

“Little did I realize when I said yes that 33 years later, I would be here welcoming the return to New Haven of the Amistad,” he said. ​“Little did I realize that today The Amistad would reverberate throughout our country, that it would become a feature movie, an opera, and would grow and grow, telling its story.”

Marder said he was pleased with the widespread impact of The Amistad.

“It’s a story that has become integrated with our understanding of our struggle for equality, for racial justice,” he said. ​“And for the first time in our country, black and white came together for freedom in an organized sense.”

That’s the lesson for 2021, he said. ​“If you saw the marches for Black Lives Matter, you saw black and white people marching together. That gives me hope.

“The vessel,” he said, ​“will play an important part in educating our people, and all of us in New Haven should be so very proud.”

Over at The Amistad across the harbor, Bruce Trammell, Sr., Discovering Amistad’s dockside interpreter, or ​“the captain of the story,” as he prefers, was reflective.

“The ship coming back, it means an awful lot for us,” he said, as a seagull swooped overhead. ​“It’s a story of New Haven, of resilience. The idea that the people of New Haven helped the Africans get free, that’s a story that we need to get out there, that’s a story that gives me hope.”