A stunning graphic history of how enslaved Africans on board the Amistad rebelled and captured the slave ship in 1839, challenging a whitewashed version of history and putting the Africans back at the center of their own freedom story
From the trio of Rediker, Lester, and Buhle comes another graphic “history from below” about the Amistad rebellion of 1839 when 53 enslaved Africans on the slave ship Amistad slipped out of their restraints and overpowered their enslavers and ship’s crew. Sold into slavery in their homeland of Sierra Leone and later bound for Puerto Príncipe, Cuba, from Havana, these Africans, led by the charismatic warrior Cinqué, forced the ship’s remaining crew to sail homeward.
Divided into 3 parts, The Black Schooner begins with the intense night of the uprising and takes readers on a reconstructed journey: from sailing on the open ocean to a New Haven, Connecticut, jail, where the captured Africans awaited trial for mutiny and murder; to the Supreme courtroom that found that the rebels had been illegally enslaved and would now be free to return to their native land. Through it all, artist David Lester chronicles their story using striking imagery, showing how they achieved an unexpected and powerful international victory for the abolitionist movement and forced some of the most powerful people in the world to confront the issue of human bondage.
Based on Rediker’s book The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom, The Black Schooner challenges a whitewashed history and instead, puts the Africans back at the center of their own freedom story—where they belong.
“A necessary and unique, expectation-shattering chronicle.”
—Library Journal, Starred Review
“Lester’s well-suited illustrations are sketchy, heavily shadowed and roughly crosshatched, and add a heightened sense of emotional tension and inescapable immediacy that resonates across the centuries of racial reckoning to come. An evocative, incisive, and powerful piece of graphic history.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The Black Schooner is a vivid and graphic depiction of the 1839 Amistad rebellion. . . . Lester’s powerful black-and-white art depicts their story, from the uprising on the ship to their subsequent imprisonment in the US and concluding with their return to Africa.”
—Gord Hill, author-artist of The 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance Comic Book
“The graphic novel, deliberately choosing history over cinema, tells much of the story through contemporary interviews as well as journal entries of the rebels. The choice of a graphic novel is deliberate, since most of the published interviews were accompanied by portraits . . . The Black Schooner tells [an] important story, in a way that’s both accessible and engaging.”
—Freedom Press (UK)
Foreword:
Why We Need Stories of Successful Resistance
by Marcus Rediker
Historical Characters
Part One: War
Part Two: Trials
Part Three: Freedom
Epilogue
Afterword:
Revolutionary Struggles Against the Slave Trade:
The role of popular art and comics
by Paul Buhle
The Black Schooner: Rebellion on the Amistad, A Graphic Novel
By David Lester and Marcus Rediker with Paul Buhle
Readers’ Guide Discussion Questions
Download the discussion guide.
- The Black Schooner is an example of Atlantic history. What is Atlantic history, and how does that perspective shape the telling of the story?
- What can be learned from the book about how the Atlantic slave trade worked in southern Sierra Leone? Who organized it? How were people enslaved, controlled, and shipped from Lomboko to Havana? What was the experience of the “Middle Passage” on the Teçora? Why did the enslaved rise up?
- Compare and contrast how Cinqué, Margru, and James Covery were enslaved. Can we imagine why Margru’s father never returned for her? Could he too have been captured by enslavers?
- What were John C. Calhoun’s arguments in favor of slavery? How did abolitionists such as Dwight Janes, Roger S. Baldwin, Lydia Marie Child, and Lewis Tappan argue against it?
- How should we interpret the Broadway play The Long, Low Black Schooner, about the Amistad uprising? Was it helpful to the cause or was it exploitative? How could it have benefitted or harmed both the Amistad Africans and the abolitionists?
- Why did Lewis Tappan detest the “circus atmosphere” created as the Amistad Africans performed acrobatics on New Haven Green? Why did he consider the acrobatics “a degradation of our cause”?
- What role did artists John Warner Barber, Sidney Moulthrop, Amasa Hewins, and Nathaniel Jocelyn play in the Amistad affair? How did the abolitionists react to their art?
- How did the Amistad Africans and the abolitionists work together to build a successful legal campaign? What kinds of tensions existed between the two groups?
- What is the significance of the statement “Bondmen who would be free, they must themselves strike the first blow”?
- What are the narrative techniques used in the book? Who are the “Witnesses to History” and how do they help to tell the story? What is the relationship between the text and the art in the graphic novel?
- What is history from below, and how does it contrast with history from above? How does the inclusion of the voices of the Amistad Africans change the story?
- The Black Schooner describes how a social movement was organized to free the Amistad Africans—the building of a community coalition, the use of art to publicize the cause, and the formation of a legal strategy for self-defense. What connections do you see between the Amistad story and the present?