Conference of the Republic of New Africa - Detroit, Michigan March 31, 1968.
Participants drafted a constitution and declaration of independence.
The 2023
New Black Nationalist
Draft Program for a
Majority Black-Led
Nation-State
The Vesey Republic
April 2, 2022 - June, 19, 2023
Call for a Draft Program
A Majority Black-Led Nation-State
Denmark Vesey (Telemaque)
Denmark Vesey’s memory and the history he represents remain contested in Charleston. In 2014, the city erected a Denmark Vesey monument after a passionate campaign that lasted nearly two decades and faced heated opposition. No images of Vesey were made during his lifetime, so the statue by Black sculptor Ed Dwight imagines what he might have looked like: a man standing proudly with his head held high, holding his hat and a carpenter’s bag with his right hand and a Bible with his left hand.
While the monument was being planned, local newspapers published editorials protesting it, describing Vesey as a criminal. As historians Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts write in their book “Denmark Vesey’s Garden,” the committee that proposed the memorial in the 1990s intended to locate it in Marion Square, a popular tourist site in downtown Charleston, but the owners of the square rejected the idea.
Eventually the committee found a home for the monument in Hampton Park, which far fewer tourists visit. The park is named for Wade Hampton, a Confederate general who was later elected governor of South Carolina. During the Civil War, however, the site served as an outdoor prison for Union soldiers, and 250 of them were buried there in a mass grave. As the war ended, Black Americans led an effort to build a new cemetery and reinter the fallen soldiers. On May 1, 1865, they held what historians now recognize as one of the earliest Memorial Day celebrations, and a marker reading “First Memorial Day in the United States of America” was set up in Hampton Park in 2010.”
The Vesey Republic - Notebook
Denmark Vesey Monument in Hampton Park, Charleston, South Carolina
Click here for Denmark Vesey's Notebook