Margu "Returns" For Amistad's 175th | New Haven Independent:
In 1839 Margu was was only 9 years old when she was snatched from her home into slavery. She was marched 80 miles to the slave pens off the coast of Sierra Leone, to await the harrowing Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean to Cuba.
In New Haven, she would help make history that our city is celebrating this week, 175 years later after a landmark civil-rights victory.
Margu was a Muslim, from a Mende culture with an advanced legal system. Because she had never left her inland home before, she and her fellow captives, on beholding the sea for the first time, proclaimed the Atlantic Ocean “the big river.”
Such stereotype-breaking and humanizing details emerged from a discussion with actress Tammy Denease at the splendid Amistad Gallery at the New Haven Museum.
Thursday evening at 5:30 p.m. Denease is portraying Margu in Sarah Margu: A Child of the Amistad. The free performance at the museum is part of the citywide celebration of the 175th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that determined the 53 Amistad captives, held in New Haven, were not property to be argued over, but free human beings. It was the nation’s first civil rights victory, and the “Black Lives Matter” moment of its day.
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