Statewide County HI Archives News.....African Americans in Hawaii, Part I May 29, 2008 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/hi/hifiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Darlene E. Kelley http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00026.html#0006374 June 7, 2008, 2:47 pm Keepers Of The Culture, A Study In Time Of The Hawaiian Islands May 29, 2008 Contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by Darlene E. Kelley http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00026.html#0006374 May 29, 2008 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Keepers of The Culture A Study in time of the Hawaiian Islands by Darlene E. Kelley African Americans in Hawaii Part 1. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ African Americans of the Hawaiian Islands a continued Study -- Part 1. The earliest settlers of African ancestry arrived in Hawaii well before the missionaries' 1812 arrival. Until Hawai'i became a territory in 1898, many of these black immigrants were active in the community as advisors, entrepreneurs and musicians. One man, called Black Jack or Mr. Keaka'ele'ele, was already living on O'ahu when Kamehameha conquered the island in 1796. He helped to build a store house for Queen Ka'ahumanu in Lahaina,and made his living in the maritime industry. Black Joe, was a long time resident, trader, and Sail Master for King Kamehameha II, working with his trading vessels and acting as an advisor and interpreter for the King. He died in 1828. In 1810, there came to the island of O'ahu an ex-slave, Anthony D. Allen, from Schenectady, New York. He married a Hawaiian girl, aquired land and livestrock, and became one of the most prosperous foreign residents on O'ahu during the next quarter of the century. When the first American missionaries arrived in 1820, he prepared a feast of welcome for them, and continued his aid by supplying vegetables, goats milk, and fruit.. He opened a farm on the plains toward Waikiki in association with Hewahewa, ran a small boarding house for seaman, and sold his goat's milk in town. He is credited for building one of the first schools in the islands and the first carriage road to Manoa Valley. He was so respected by the Hawaiian royalty that they gave him land to hold and pass on to his decendants. The land is the present site of the Washington Intermediate school near King and Kalakaua. His son was a excellant paniolo ( cowboy ). Allen died in 1835. He was well respected among the missionaries and they all attended his funeral. The whaling ships arrived in various parts of the islands between 1820-1880. On these ships were descendants of black Portuguese men from the Cape Verde Islands off the Coast of West Africa. Some stayed, married and became residents and worked as musicians, tailors, cooks, barbers and sailors. It is said that 70% of the ships' crews were black. Richard Armstrong, who was born in 1805 Pennsylvania, the son of a black minister, attended three years at Princeton Theo- logical Seminary, and arrived in Hawaii with the fifth company of missionaries, along with his wife Clarissa Chapman Armstrong. He arrived in 1832. He was stationed for a year at the mission in Marquesas Islands, and later built a church on Maui. He was pastor of the Kawaiahao Church in Honolulu from 1840 to 1848. In that year he left the mission to become Minister of Public Instruction after the death of William Richards. Armstrong was to serve the government for the remainder of his life. He was a member of the privy council and the House of Nobles, and acted as the royal chaplain. He aided efforts to attain Hawaiian Independence. He set up the Board of Education under the kingdom in 1855 and was its president until his death in 1860. The Armstrongs had ten children. His son Samuel Chapman Armstrong ( 1839-1929 ) became a Union general in the American Civil War and was founder of Hampton Institute in Virginia in 1868. It must be remembered that a number of African American men were entrepreneurs and active in early Hawaiian business matters. A paradox of opportunities given the extreme racial climates of oppression and salvery in the states. William the Baker was the King's cook and sold his place in 1833. Joseph Bedford, known as " Joe Dollar" had a boarding house from 1826 for almost twenty years. Spencer Rhodes operated a barber shop in 1838. Fredrick E. Binns had his barber shop by 1845 and Charles Nicholson, an African American tailor, was designing and sewing from 1840 thu 1861. Another Barber shop was owned by William Johnson in 1863. Betsy Stockton, an intelligent and dignified ex-slave of the President of Princeton University, who had studied extensively using the library of her ex-master, attended evening classes at Princeton Theological Seminary. She accompanied the Charles Stuart family with the second group of missionaries to arrive in Hawaii aboard the ship Thames in 1823 from New Haven, Connecticut. She learned the Hawaian language and was one of the founders of the Lahainaluna School on Maui, probably the first school for commoners, where she spent two years as a teacher of English, Latin, History and Algebra ( 1823 -25 ), before her untimely return to the East Coast due to the illness of Mrs. Stuart. She is well remembered for her high moral and religious character and for helping to heal the sick while on Maui. Because of the great slavery debate in the United States and many of the plantations owners were from or familiar with the slave system in the south, Blacks were intentionally excluded from the proposed lists of immigrant groups sought in the 1850's to provide contract labor by the Kingdom of Hawaii by local missionaries and abolitionists opposed to contract labor. At one point, U.S. Secretary of State, Blaine, urged the importation of Blacks and not Asians to help replenish the dwindling Hawaiian population, only to meet resistance and adversion to Negro immigrants until after Hawai'i became a Territory in 1900. Although individrual African Americans were accepted into a community, mass immigration was discouraged by legal restraint as early as 1882 when sugar planters wanted to import large numbers of blacks to relieve their labor shortage. Moreover, again in 1913, there were strenuous efforts to keep the 25th Negro Infantry Regiment from being stationed in Hawaii. Yet they came and remained for several years without creating friction and made a favorable impression. Unfortunately, there were some prominent African American immigrants who never wanted to be affiliated with the darker races and silently blended into the local community denying their African American heritage. In the late ninteeth century, Brooker T. Washington, the famous educator from Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, came to Hawai'i to investigate the possibilities of African American plantation workers being used to suppliment the growing Japanese, Chinese, Filopinos and Portuguese workers. To his surprise and discovery, he found the working conditions in many ways worse than in the South at that time. However, by 1901, the first group of about two hundred African American laborers was brought there by the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association from Louisiana and Alabama to join the other Oriental plantation workers on the islands of Maui and Hawai'i. Many later returned South or were amalgamated into the local community. The prospects of bringing experienced plantation laborer and their families from the South to Hawai'i was welcomed by many plantation owners. Not only would this mean additinal farm hands to work on the plantations, but it also meant African American women could also provide personal and houshold chores to the white wives of plantation owners. The first group arrived in the islands in January 1901 and by June 1901, several hundred had been recrited for the plantations on Maui. They were offered $ 26.00 per month, free housing and firewood and roundtrip transportation if they fulfilled their three year contracts. Unfortunately, the several hundred that went to Maui to work were very soon disappointed because of the harshness of working and living conditions on the Plantations. The Puerto Ricans who came to Hawai'i around 1901 were in the main also of Negro, Indian, and Spanish descent although in the census they were listed as Caucasion until 1940. probably due to the Spanish part of their heritage. In 1907, another small group of twenty-five to thirty families came to Maui recruited from Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama, including the Crockett family and a Mr. Maple, a chemist. The Maple School on Maui is named for the family. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ To be continued in part 2. File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/hi/statewide/newspapers/africana5nw.txt This file has been created by a form at http://www.poppet.org/hifiles/ File size: 9.0 Kb