Few sites are more fitting for a remembrance of the atrocities of the African slave trade than Key West’s African Cemetery at Higgs Beach. And that’s precisely how the site was used on Aug. 23, the International Day of Remembrance for the Slave Trade and Its Abolition. This year’s ceremony featured poetry readings, prayers and historical context.
The site commemorates the burial place of 295 Africans who were rescued from illegal slave-trading ships that were bound for Cuba in 1860. Three U.S. Navy ships intercepted three slave ships at sea and brought 1,432 rescued Africans to Key West, where the local residents provided food and clothing and built a temporary barracks while they awaited the ships that would take them back across the ocean to Liberia, a West African country founded by the United States for former enslaved people. Although located in Africa, Liberia was thousands of miles from where most of the Africans had previously lived and where they were captured.
While the rescued Africans were in Key West, 295 of them, many of them children, succumbed to illness and injuries sustained aboard the slave ships. They were buried in unmarked graves at what is today Higgs Beach.
In 2002, historian Corey Malcom and other researchers used ground-penetrating radar to identify the locations of the graves. Rather than disturb any remains, the site was made into a memorial. Concrete slabs covered the burial site and it is adorned with artwork by artist and professor Gene Tinnie.
The Aug. 23 International Day of Remembrance “is intended to inscribe the tragedy of the slave trade in the memory of all peoples,” and encourage consideration of its causes, the methods and consequences, according to the website for UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
