Today in Black History – June 28th

Joseph Cinque  aka Sengbe Pieh
AMISTAD

June 28, 1839

Joseph Cinqué (c. 1814 – c. 1879) formerly known as Sengbe Pieh, from West Africa – Sierra Leone was captured and enslaved with others illegally by slave traders in 1839.  At the time of his capture, Joseph had a wife and 3 children.

Cinque was sold to a Portuguese slave trader who sold him in Cuba to 2 Spaniards.  The 2 Spaniards had plan to sell Cinque and 110 others to sugar plantations in Cuba.  Instead, Cinque lead a revolt on board the ship Amistad to force them to take them back to Sierra Leone. For two months, they were at sea and eventually the US coast guard boarded and charged the slaves with mutiny and murder.

Ciinque and the other slaves were tried and the decision was made in their favor.  Later, the case was appealed to the Supreme Court and in March 1840, the Supreme Court ruled that the Africans mutinied to regain their freedom after being kidnapped and sold illegally.

History: Colfax Massacre

The Root) — Amazing Fact About the Negro No. 41: Which massacre resulted in a Supreme Court decision limiting the federal government’s ability to protect black Americans from racial targeting?

In Colfax, La., on Easter Sunday 1873, a mob of white insurgents, including ex-Confederate and Union soldiers, led an assault on the Grant Parish Courthouse, the center of civic life in the community, which was occupied and surrounded — and defended — by black citizens determined to safeguard the results of the state’s most recent election.  They, too, were armed, but they did not have the ammunition to outlast their foes, who, outflanking them, proceeded to mow down dozens of the courthouse’s black defenders, even when they surrendered their weapons. The legal ramifications were as horrifying as the violence — and certainly more enduring; in an altogether different kind of massacre, United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the U.S. Supreme Court tossed prosecutors’ charges against the killers in favor of severely limiting the federal government’s role in protecting the emancipated from racial targeting, especially at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan.

Black folks could NEVER depend on the U. S. Supreme Court to protect our voting rights even 140 years after Colfax.  When we don’t remember history we are doomed to repeat it.