SLAVE SHIP REBELLIONS

The importance of slave ship rebellions is that fact that kidnapped Africans were not passive victims to the slave trade. We can be inspired by those who participated in these rebellions because they show how to be brave in the face of terror, death, and the unknown. 


Amistad from youtube.com: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxRfe6C3otM about an 1839 mutiny aboard a slave ship that is traveling towards the northeastern coast of America. Much of the story involves a court-room drama about the free man who led the revolt.

From: http://slaverebellion.org/index.php?page=african-insurrections
Thousands of enslaved Africans tried to overthrow their captors on slave ships taking them to the Americas. The exact number of shipboard rebellions is unknown. But, historians have documented over 500 incidents.^[1] On board slave revolts have been debated in a new light. For a long time scholars have been overly concerned with enslaved African resistances in the Americas and on the plantations, little attention has been given to the patterns of revolts on slave board ships on the African coast and in the Atlantic crossing between 1650 and 1860.


¹Eric Robert Taylor, If We Must Die: Shipboard Insurrections in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Louisiana State University Press, 2009.