Marcus Rediker: The African Origins of the Amistad Rebellion

The 2013 Debra L. Lee Lecture on Slavery and Justice
Marcus Rediker: The African Origins of the Amistad Rebellion
February 25, 2013

This lecture explores the West African cultural logic of the Amistad Rebellion of 1839, in which 53 enslaved Africans organized a successful uprising aboard a slave schooner that was carrying them to a life of bondage in Cuba. African ways of thinking and doing remained central to the rebels' self-organization in American jails and to their eventual legal victory and repatriation to southern Sierra Leone in 1842.

Marcus Rediker is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh. He is author or editor of seven books, most recently The Slave Ship: A Human History (Viking-Penguin, 2007) and The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom(Viking-Penguin, 2012).