Name: Rethinking the Amistad Story
Start: 2025-04-03T17:30:00-04:00
Location: 114 Whitney Ave, New Haven, CT, United States, Connecticut 06510

Internationally renowned historian, writer, filmmaker, playwright, and activist Dr. Marcus Rediker will present, “Rethinking the Amistad Story” at the New Haven Museum (NHM), on Thursday, April 3, 2025. Reception at 5:30 pm., program at 6 p.m. The program will stream live on Facebook and later be shared on the NHM YouTube channel.
Registration is required for the free program and available here: https://www.simpletix.com/e/rethinking-the-amistad-story-with-marcus-tickets-202614
This is a rare local opportunity to meet the historian whose work transformed the understanding of the Amistad revolt and was central to the recent re-interpretation of the permanent New Haven Museum exhibit, “Amistad: Retold,” which opened in 2024. Rediker will discuss who the African rebels were, how they waged the uprising, and what the ordeal meant to them. He will explore the legacies of the Amistad Revolt as a powerful example of resistance to oppression that was, as he says, a “deeply human affair about real people, under real circumstances, making life-and-death decisions in real time.”
The local history of Amistad will also be discussed: what happened in the interactions between the Amistad Africans and the mostly white abolitionists in the New Haven jail; how the two groups together built a local and diverse social movement to support the legal battle; and how groups like the Amistad Committee subsequently kept the history of the event alive in popular memory.
Rediker first visited NHM in 2009 while conducting research for his book “The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom.” He will address what drove him to research the “Amistad” in Sierra Leone, New Haven, and the subsequent presentation of his work in graphic novels, a documentary, and his recent play about the revolutionary abolitionist, “The Return of Benjamin Lay,” co-written with Naomi Wallace.
“The New Haven Museum hopes that participants will see how Rediker’s scholarship transformed historical understandings of the events of the Amistad, the history of slavery and abolition, and the local, national, and global dimensions of this story,” says Joanna Steinberg, NHM’s director of learning and engagement.
The program is organized by New Haven Museum with the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and the Amistad Committee, with support by Connecticut Humanities.