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Juneteenth and Other Lesser Known African-American Historical Culture

Khalid Elhassan June 15, 2020 34 min

Colonel Tye - American Revolutionary War — Colonel Tye as portrayed in a PBS documentary. PBS

36. A Black Man Named British Freedom

Advertisement for the sale of slaves in colonial America. Voice of America

There was a black man in Nova Scotia, whose name was British Freedom. That is not the beginning of a limerick. In the late eighteenth century, there actually was a black man named British Freedom, scratching a living from stingy soil outside the small community of Preston, a few miles from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

British Freedom was not the name he had been given at birth. Nor, for that matter, had he been born in Nova Scotia. How he came by his unusual name, and how he came to be in Nova Scotia, is part of a greater but lesser-known aspect of the American Revolution. A tragic tale of a historic turning point, when American history failed to turn on the issue of slavery and the rights of the country’s black population. A tale whose malign legacy lingers with us to this day.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.