Exactly one year after setting sail from New Haven on a trans-Atlantic journey, the Freedom Schooner Amistad returned to New Haven, amid pomp, celebration, and prayer.

“We are here not just to celebrate,” Sierra Leonean Donald George (pictured) said in a libation before a festive welcoming Long Wharf crowd Saturday, “but to remember how the 53 brave Sierra Leoneans fought with their own hands for their own freedom, but not forgetting the help of the people of Connecticut to gain their freedom.”

Read the original text and see the photos 

Stay tuned for more pictures and video from Amistad's Homecoming Celebrations  

The Freedom Schooner Amistad sails the world as a symbol of freedom, justice and human cooperation among all races and religions.  The message is founded on the telling of the Amistad Story where kidnapped Africans were set free by a pro-slavery U.S. Supreme Court because black and white abolitionists work tirelessly to win their freedom.

On June 21, 2008  exactly one year  to the day - Freedom Schooner Amistad will return to its homeport of New Haven having completed a 14,000 miles long circumnavigation of the Atlantic Ocean as part of an international commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in the former British Empire (1807) and the United States (1808).

(The article was published by New Haven Register - June 18th, 2007 )

Mock trial puts spotlight on Amistad’s role 

The importance of the history of the Amistad Incident was underscored lately as newspapers' headlines (Connecticut Post, Shelton Weekly) declared that Connecticut students “revised” the famous verdict in a mock trial exercise: the students voted to send the La Amistad captives back to Cuba and a life of slavery. This is not, as one headline suggested, a “revision” but a “reversal” of the actual decision reached by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1841.

It is ironic that such a “verdict” could be reached by young people in Connecticut, the home of the famous civil rights victory. But it was a freely debated exercise, which can occasionally produce an unexpected outcome. Nonetheless, the irony is particularly noteworthy when you consider that the mock trial was held just as the State’s official flagship and tall ship ambassador – the Freedom Schooner Amistad – was sailing home to Connecticut after a year-long transatlantic voyage commemorating the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade.