Ibram X. Kendi Instagram – This standing ovation capped off a recent #Barracoon event I’ll never forget at the Trinity United Methodist Church in Denver, organized by @tatteredcoverbookstore. The church was founded in August 1859, the same month a ship named the Clotilda arrived in Mobile, Alabama, with Cudjo Lewis and other enslaved people from West Africa. Lewis tells his life story in Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon, which I adapted for young readers and now is a New York Times Best Seller.
Among the founders of this church was Clara Brown. Upon the death of her Kentucky enslaver, Brown had been emancipated at 56 years old around the same time Lewis had been enslaved at 18 years old.
Brown traveled West in the midst of the Colorado Gold Rush. This predominantly White influx of settlers increasingly occupied Native lands and decimated Native communities in Colorado’s plains and mountains.
In Gilpin County, Brown established a laundry service, the occupation of many freed Black women at that time. She saved her money and acquired housing and mining properties in Denver and Boulder. Brown became known as the “Angel of the Rockies” for opening her arms, home, and purse to formerly enslaved Black people coming to Colorado.
But as she help found Trinity United Methodist Church in 1859, Brown longed for what Lewis longed for as he walked off the Clotilda that month into Alabama slavery. They longed for what human traders brutally separated: families.
International human traders had separated Lewis from his parents and siblings in 1859. Decades earlier, domestic human traders had separated Brown from her husband and children. When Black people found freedom before and after the Civil War, there number one priority was usually finding family.
Lewis never saw his parents and siblings again. He married after the Civil War and created a new family in AfricaTown. After decades of searching, in 1882, Brown found her daughter, Eliza Jane, in Council Bluffs, Iowa. #blackhistorymonth | Posted on 13/Feb/2024 21:41:01
