2 The Baltimore Guide
Wednesday, AUGUST 22, 2012
Fell’s Point remembers slave voyage by Danielle Sweeney DSWEENEY@baltimoreguide.com
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Fell’s Point has been chosen by the Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Markers Project Inc. as the first port in the U.S. to commemorate the lives of the millions of Africans who died in the Middle Passage from Africa to the New World. “Baltimore was chosen as the first city because many African-Americans can trace their history to the port,” says Ann Chinn, executive director of MPCPMP. “Baltimore was a major port for the human trade in the Chesapeake region, and the Chesapeake region basically established the legal codes, practices and rationales for enslavement of Africans and their descendants that would be adopted by this nation from its founding,” says Chinn. The event will take place Aug. 23 at the Broadway Pier. There will be a dawn ceremony at 6:00 a.m. and a dusk ceremony at 7:15 p.m. Both will include sage burning, prayer, libation, calling of ancestors’ names and drumming. At the dawn ceremony, all present will be invited to take a cut flower to the water’s edge and place it in the harbor to remember those who died in the Middle Passage. The ceremony is multicultural and interfaith. Local participants include Rev. Dr. Cecil Gray, of Northwood-Appold United
Methodist Church; Marvin “Doc” Cheatham, president of the Baltimore chapter of the Local Action Network; and Frieda Minner, of the Baltimore American Indian Center, which is located in Upper Fells Point. In addition, students at the Crossroads School, located in East Harbor and run by the Living Classrooms Foundation, will have a role in the ceremony, and Morgan State University’s students in the Communications Center Video Department will be recording interviews at both ceremonies. The ceremony coincides with the International Day of Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition, Aug. 23, as declared by United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization. Says Skipp Sanders, executive director of Baltimore’s Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African-American History and Culture and a supporter of the project: “It is my hope that this designation and marker placement will provide a comprehensive picture of Maryland’s AfricanAmerican history and will offer opportunities to highlight individuals like Frederick Douglass, who spent his formative years in Fell’s Point, and other Maryland heros who stand on the shoulders of those who were lost in the massive burial ground of the Atlantic Ocean.”