A Portrait of Resistance: Power and Problems in the Image of Cinque of the Amistad Mutiny

A small almost square portrait of a Black man wearing a white toga appeared in early 1840. This man was Cinque, or Sengbe Pieh, the leader of the mutiny on board La Amistad, a slave transport ship intending to carry him and other West Africans to Caribbean Islands for a lifetime of brutality and labor. Instead, due to their resistance, the Amistad Africans went to trial, ending at the U.S. Supreme Court and won their freedom.