Excerpt from caribbeannationalweekly
Over the years, suggestions have been made to rename Black History month, “Black American History Month” because of the focus on Black American history.
American black history was the original concept
To be fair, it was the intent of American historian Carter G. Woodson to highlight Black American History when he founded Negro History Week in 1926. The week later evolved into Black History Month, but Black American history remained the focus.
However, the history of black people in the Caribbean and the USA is intricately woven in many instances.
Black history originated in the Caribbean.
While African American history is usually traced back to the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in 1619, enslaved people were brought from Africa to Spanish-occupied West Indian Islands before then. As the British seized ownership of the islands and focused on the development of sugar plantations, the Africa-to-West Indies slave trade intensified. Some of these enslaved people, notably in Barbados, obtained freedom quickly and migrated to regions in Virginia and Massachusetts in the US to create the initial nucleus of free blacks in America.
While enslaved Black people in America, particularly the southern states, struggled with the atrocities of slavery, spawning a civil war between the northern and southern states, blacks in the Caribbean were seizing their freedom.
After a thirteen-year rebellion, enslaved people led by Toussaint L’Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines completed the Haitian Revolution against the French to create the first western black independent nation in 1804. And, in Jamaica, Blacks like Sam Sharp, Paul Bogle, and Nanny of the Maroons strived to ensure the British emancipated slavery in Jamaica, and the rest of the Caribbean, by the 1860s.
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“in Jamaica, Blacks like Sam Sharp, Paul Bogle, and Nanny of the Maroons strived to ensure the British emancipated slavery in Jamaica, and the rest of the Caribbean, by the 1860s”
Slaves were legally emancipated throughout the British West Indies on 1 August 1834, when the UK’s Slave Emancipation Act came into force, and gained their unconditional freedom at midnight on 31 July 1838. P