LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
BY DeWAYNE WICKHAM
O ne hundred and fifty years ago , on February 14 , 1873 , the Baltimore Sun reported that “ a group of colored persons ” gathered at the city ’ s Madison Street Colored Presbyterian Church to talk about slavery in Cuba .
Many of the Black men and women who attended this meeting had only a few years earlier been freed from the yoke of American slavery . On this night , they were brought together by a group of African Americans who called themselves the Cuban Anti-Slavery Committee to adopt a petition that urged the United States government to help end “ the sad condition of a half million of our brethren now held in slavery in the island of Cuba ...”
As it turned out , neither Congress nor President Ulysses S . Grant did anything to end slavery in Cuba . But the bond that meeting created between Blacks in the United States and the people of Cuba has been long standing .
Both in the first decade of the 20th century when Cuba emerged from a U . S . occupation of that Caribbean Island nation , and again after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959 , the Baltimore Afro American newspaper was protective of both Cuban independence and the rights of Afro Cubans .
Jackie Jones , dean , Morgan State University ’ s School of Global Journalism & Communication , Garcia and Jones renew memorandum of understanding Juan Jacomino , translator , and Dr . Mariam Nicado Garcia , Rector of the University of Havana
In 1941 , while living in the Morgan Park section of Baltimore , W . E . B . DuBois , the legendary Black journalist , sociologist and civil rights rights activist , traveled to Cuba and forged close ties to Fernando Ortiz , the great Cuban anthropologist and scholar of Afro Cubans .
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