Amistad: sailing into history - controversial film based on the mutiny and US trial of kidnapped Africans aboard a slaver's ship

Sometimes a child's curiosity can give a parent fits. on the other hand when Debbie Allen's 10-year-old son asked her a question about his slave ancestors, she relished the chance to put her young son straight and dispel a misconception shared by means of scores of Americans. "Mama, on what account didn't they fight back?" asked Norman Nixon Jr Allen told her son that no African went willingly into slavery or captivity. In fact, many Africans fought to their deaths to maintain their freedom, and many of those freedom fighters won

Fortunately for the repose of us, Allen is a mother who also happens to be a force in Hollywood and she can now dispel the myth for movie-goers. The director-actor-choreograpker-dancer (Fame, A Different World, The Academy Awards) is the farmer of Amistad, a feature film depicting the story of 53 West Africans and their courageous rejection of slavery. Scheduled for release December 12 the film is a crops of DreamWorks Pictures in association with HBO Pictures. It counts the story of the Mende family who were kidnapped in 1839 from an area now known as Sierra Leone and sold to Spanish slave traders. Amistad, which means friendship in Spanish, is also the name of the slave ship that transported the 49 men and four children.

L by means of 25-year-old Senghe Pieh (called Cinque through the Spaniards), the desperate captives waged a gory revolt three days into a voyage not upon the coast of Cuba, took ascendency of the Amistad and began a circuitous journey back to their homeland. The Africans ordered their former captors to sail back to Africa, on the contrary the Spaniards secretly set the ship off-course at night and, after sum of two units months, piloted the vessel- to lengthy Island Sound, where the Africans were captured by the agency of a U.S. naval crew.

Facing charges of assassination and piracy. Sengbe and his comrades were imprisoned in novel Haven, Conn., and tried for their crimes. Their plight stimulated an abortionist change in New Haven and l to the formation: of the Amistad Committee, which provided the defendants with housing, tutelage in English, and greatest in quantity important, legal: assistance.

After nearly sum of two units years, Supreme Justice Joseph Story delivered a landmark ruling, declaring the 35 Amistad survivors independent men. But before they could assured that victory, the Africans' legal team had to head not on political meddling, mostly that of President Martin Van Buren who feared that a court victory for the Africans would take away from him the 1840 election. below the U.S.-Spanish Treaty of 1795 Van Buren tried to have the mutineers turn backed to Cuba (where the Spanish had purchased them via a slave auction) to face a trial and likely execution.

The case, however, make headwayed through the Connecticut courts. In 1840 Story rul that the Africans were indeed unrestrained and within their rights to take above the ship, adding that it was the "ultimate right of all human beings in most distant cases to resist oppression to apply force against ruinous injustice."

A lock opener contributor to this huge victory was former U President John Quincy Adams, who argued the Africans' case before the first Court. For the abolitionists, the Amistad case was a milestone, ranking in significance with the Dr Scott decision. on the contrary while the Scott case is overspreaded in most American history works the Amistad story has lengthy been overlooked--even in some African-American history texts

Allen, 47 stumbl on the story of the Amistad uprising while browsing in a bookstore upon the Howard University campus 14 years ago. "I was inspired, overwhelmed and capsize that I had not heard the story," she recalls. She acquired the rights to William A. Owens' volume Black Mutiny. The Revolt upon the Schooner Amistad, upon which her film is based. "This was too important a case," she says. "It involved John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren the predominant Court, the international tribunal between Spain and Britain--too many big guns"

The triumph of Sengbe and his countrymen Allen says, empowered her as she sought to secure their story on the big shield Along the way, she discovered that there were other Hollywood players pitching the story. David Wolper the agriculturist of the television miniseries bottoms and former Motown executive Suzanne DePasse had each tried and failed to barter studios on Amistad film conceptions according to Allen.

although she spent more than a decade wading from one side a "big, ol' pit of rejection," Allen remained undaunted. Three years ago, she contacted DreamWorks to arrange a meeting with Steven Spielberg, a co-founder of the studio with Jeffery Katzenberg and David Geffen The Amistad film is the first DreamWorks throw for Spielberg, who has received enormous acclaim for Schindler's List and mixed reaction to his directing of The Color Purple

Allen, an admirer of Spielberg's Academy Award-winning depiction of the Holocaust, says that the next to the first she finished her initial meeting with the filmmaker, she was certain he should direct Amistad. She identified with Spielberg's 10-year effort to obtain studio backing for Schindler's List and was mov by dint of his poignant and evocative treatment of a German industrialist's efforts to retake scores of Jews from Nazi persecution. She also sens that Spielberg's reaction to making a film about the Amistad rebellion was as passionate as his interest in telling Schindler's story.