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Host committee co-chairs feel ties to Amistad story
March, 2003
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Amistad will stay longerThe October visit of the Freedom Schooner Amistad has been extended by six days, to October 14 – 26, 2003. Plans are also in the works for a major Massachusetts Conference event to coincide with the ship’s stay in Boston Harbor. That event is planned for Saturday, October 25th. For more details, visit our Amistad Resource Page. |
The story of the Amistad had been weaving its way in and out of the lives of Beverly Morgan-Welch and Richard Harter even before they were tapped to chair the Host Committee that will bring the ship to Boston in October.
Growing up in Connecticut, Morgan-Welch was always familiar with the story of the Mendi Africans, who after being illegally sold into slavery revolted aboard the cargo ship La Amistad in an attempt to gain their freedom and sail home. They were captured off the coast of Connecticut, where they were held for two years as their case made its way through the courts.
“This story is one that I learned about and was just overwhelmed by the courage and the power of the story and all the people who were a part of it,” Morgan-Welch said.
In fact, the work of abolitionist Congregationalists to care for, defend
and eventually send the Amistad captives home is a part of the reason Morgan-Welch
is a member of the United Church of Christ today .
“I chose to be a Congregationalist because of the doctrine of the church.
It’s a justice church, and that spoke volumes to me as a child,” said Morgan-Welch,
the daughter of a Baptist minister who grew up in a federated Baptist-Congregational
church.
“To see the involvement of the Congregational church in freeing these kidnapped men and children – it is very important to my understanding of myself,” said Morgan-Welch, who attends South Church in Andover, UCC.
When Morgan-Welch worked at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in
Hartford, she was part of an effort to form the Amistad Foundation,
designed to
bring art and culture to diverse audiences.
And later, when she worked at Raytheon, Morgan-Welch sought out a chance to meet the former Raytheon Chairman Charles Adams, a descendent of John Quincy Adams, who won the freedom of the Amistad Africans arguing before the US Supreme Court.
“This has always been such an important story to me that when I saw him, I was just flabbergasted,” she said. “He shared with me his favorite speech about the Amistad story. It was just wonderful to meet a member of the family.”
When the replica of the Amistad was built to serve as a floating civil rights museum several years ago, Morgan-Wright donated the navigational system for the ship.
Morgan-Welch’s co-chair, Richard Harter, has also found that the Amistad story has repeatedly affected him.
Harter spent 12 years serving on the former UCC Board for Homeland
Ministries, which housed the American Missionary Association
– an organization that
was originally founded to help the Amistad captives, and that
went on to found
hundreds of schools
and colleges for freed blacks in the south.
Harter went on to serve as a trustee at LeMoyne-Owen College in Tennessee, one of the schools founded by the AMA.
“That school is a direct, living outcome of the Amistad story,” said Harter, a member of First Church in Cambridge, Congregational.
More recently, when serving as interim president at Chicago Theological Seminary, Harter attended an event where the speaker was a retired judge.
“He and I got talking, and when he discovered that I had this history, he became extremely warm and positive. He said that he grew up in rural Alabama, where his school was an AMA school. He went on to LeMoyne College, then law school,” Harter said.
“He couldn’t have been more positive about how his life had been changed by the experience,” Harter said.
“At various points in my life I have been able to see the late 20th, early 21st Century outcomes and consequences of the actions of those brave people long ago, Harter said.
“I believe that history, if its known by more people, will help others to have the same kind of insights and experiences I’ve been able to have.”