NEWS FEATURE: `Amistad’ committee lives on in UCC social-justice efforts

c. 1997 Religion News Service HARTFORD, Conn. _ The committee formed to fight for the freedom of the Africans who rebelled on the slave ship”La Amistad”_ the basis for the new Steven Spielberg film”Amistad”_ left a historic legacy still evident today in the social-justice efforts of the United Church of Christ. The Amistad Committee sowed […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

HARTFORD, Conn. _ The committee formed to fight for the freedom of the Africans who rebelled on the slave ship”La Amistad”_ the basis for the new Steven Spielberg film”Amistad”_ left a historic legacy still evident today in the social-justice efforts of the United Church of Christ.

The Amistad Committee sowed the seeds for construction of a network of schools for freed slaves in the South after the Civil War, for church support for the civil rights movement and for shaping the UCC’s current social-justice ministries.


Among the many who have benefited from the committee’s legacy is the Rev. Andrew Young, who worked with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Young, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and mayor of Atlanta, credits the Amistad Committee’s legacy for providing him with an education and paying for his field work as a civil rights organizer.”Ministries to bring about justice, to advocate on behalf of the homeless poor, to march against racism and sexism, to insist upon human rights throughout the world, to end environmental devastation are all part of the continuing (Amistad) event,” says a UCC brochure.

While the Amistad Committee’s work remains largely unknown to most Americans, that’s hardly true for New England Congregationalists and UCC members, said the Rev. Davida Foy Crabtree, the UCC’s Connecticut conference minister, headquartered in Hartford. Amistad Sundays, during which the slave ship rebellion is remembered, is an annual feature of many Connecticut UCC churches.

Crabtree, for one, said she first learned of the Amistad Committee’s work as a girl growing up in Litchfield, Conn.

But like most retellings of the story of the La Amistad African captives, director Spielberg’s film did not make clear the central role of Congregationalists, Crabtree said.

Most references to church involvement in the case _ which centers on some 40 West Africans sold into slavery and their legal struggle in the United States to regain their freedom _ usually mentions”evangelicals”or Christian”abolitionists”without noting the Congregationalist ties, said Crabtree.

Most Congregational churches _ which can trace their American roots back to the early Puritans _ were part of a 1957 merger into the UCC, a mainline Protestant denomination with national offices in Cleveland. Today, the liberal UCC has about 1.5 million members and some 6,100 congregations nationwide.

Oil paintings of the Amistad episode and its key African and Congregationalist protagonists grace the sixth-floor conference room of the UCC building in downtown Cleveland.


The MDULUCC’s social-justice ministry legacy grew out of MDULthe formation of the Amistad Committee in 1839, a week after the Spanish ship’s African captives had gained control of the vessel in a brief but bloody revolt. The committee provided for the defense of the MendeMDUL tribesmen, who had rebelled against enslavement and were jailed in New Haven, Conn., where they were charged with mutiny, murder and piracy.

The committee’s organizers included Lewis Tappan, a prosperous evangelical abolitionist; Joshua Levitt, a lawyer and Congregational pastor; and Simeon S. Jocelyn, a white Congregational minister who led a black Congregational congregation in New HavenMDUL that is today the Dixwell Avenue United Church of Christ.

Other Congregationalists were intimately involved in many ways. A Yale theology professor, Josiah Willard Gibbs, visited the men in jail and learned to count to ten in MendeMDUL. He walked the docks of New York repeating the numbers until he found a man who understood MendeMDUL and brought him to Connecticut to act as an MDULinterpreter so MDULthe Africans could MDULtell their story.

Yale Divinity students provided tutoring and a woman was employed to teach the Mende children. The First Church of Christ, Congregational, in Farmington, Conn., arranged for the Africans to be guests of the town after they won their case and were freed from jail.

When former President John Quincy Adams argued the Africans’ case successfully before the U.S. Supreme Court, the Amistad Committee _ not the United States government _ raised the money for the Africans to sail home to what is now Sierra Leone.

Following the case’ successful conclusion, the Amistad Committee did not disband. Instead, its members helped to create the American Missionary Association in 1846, the first anti-slavery Christian mission society on American soil.


Within five years after the Civil War, the association founded 300 mission schools for blacks. Those schools have flowered into such institutions as Howard University in Washington, D.C., and Fisk University in Nashville.”These schools influenced my life time and time again,”Andrew Young, a Howard graduate, wrote in his 1996 autobiography,”An Easy Burden.” The American Missionary Association continues as a division of the UCC’s Board for Homeland Ministries and is concerned with ministries among the poor, immigrants, the disabled, the elderly and AIDS sufferers.

MJP END RENNER

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