For any who have not yet seen the Steven Spielberg epic, Amistad, watch for the Oberlin connection. The film recounts the history of the fifty-three blacks, including three young girls, illegally kidnapped from Mendeland (now Sierra Leone), West Africa, in 1839, and sold to two Cuban landowners at the Havana slave market. The captives were bound in irons aboard the Spanish ship Amistad, sailing toward the north coast of Cuba, when, on the fourth night at sea, they broke their chains and took over the vessel, killing the captain and the mulatto cook. Charting an uncertain course toward Long Island, they were captured when a boatload of the men set ashore for food and water. Forty men and three children of the original group had survived the journey, and all were taken to stand trial in New London, Connecticut. The Africans, unable to speak any language but their native Mende, were unable to explain themselves, or provide a motive for their actions.
Ardent abolitionists Lewis and Arthur Tappan, wealthy New York merchants who saved Oberlin College from bankruptcy in 1834, shortly after its founding, pledged substantial support if the college inaugurated a policy of student ad-missions regardless of color. Lewis Tappan again laid his beliefs on the line when he helped rouse public support for Amistad's Africans. He considered the event "a providential occurrence," and felt that the rebellion and trial were a way to humanize the issue of slavery and to broaden the campaign against it. Tappan had long thought that "the heart of the nation would not be effectually touched except through the power of sympathy."
Former President John Quincy Adams was eventually enlisted to represent the group in the trial, and by the time deliberations and appeals concluded in 1841, they were allowed to live as free people wherever they wished. All thirty-five of the original fifty-three who were still living opted to return to Africa. Only one of the Amistad Africans ever returned to America: Sarah Marqru Kinson, one of the youngsters snared in the Amistad events, returned to study at Oberlin College for a year, and then left for home to do missionary work there.
Sarah is also a featured character in the opera Amistad by composer Anthony Davis and librettist Thulani Davis. The work received its world premiere at the Chicago Lyric Opera Theater in November 1997.