The Black Schooner

A powerful graphic history of how enslaved Africans aboard the Amistad rebelled in 1839 and seized the slave ship. The work challenges a whitewashed historical narrative and puts Africans back at the center of their own story of freedom.

From the collaboration of Rediker, Lester and Buhle comes another „history from below“: 53 enslaved Africans, kidnapped from their home in Sierra Leone and bound from Havana to Puerto Príncipe (Cuba), broke free from their chains and overpowered their enslavers and the ship’s crew. Under the leadership of the charismatic warrior Cinqué, they forced the remaining crew to set a course for home.

Told in three parts, The Black Schooner begins with the intense night of the uprising and follows the reconstructed journey: from the open sea to a prison in New Haven, Connecticut, where the captives awaited trial for mutiny and murder, all the way to the chamber of the Supreme Court, which found that they had been illegally enslaved and were now free to return home. Artist David Lester captures this story in striking images, showing how the rebels won an unexpected, powerful international victory for the abolition movement and forced the world’s powerful to face the reality of human slavery.

Based on Rediker’s book The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom, The Black Schooner counters the whitewashed historical record and puts Africans back at the center of their own story of freedom — where they belong.