In honor of Worldwide Women’s Date and you can VI Record Few days, the audience is highlighting three fearless feminine so you’re able to just who the latest Area owes a great high loans. There is still work as complete, that’s the reason i review to get determination and support from the Virgin Islanders who’ve moved just before all of us.
Queen Mary
Mary Thomas, also known as King Mary, (ca. 1848–1905) was one of many management of the 1878 “Fireburn” work riot, or uprising, towards isle of St. Croix.
Mary Thomas are off Antigua and arrived in St. Croix from the 1860s for taking work at brand new ranches within the brand new island. Adopting the 1848 emancipation off enslaved Africans throughout the Danish Western Indies, an enthusiastic 1849 labor laws repaired wages and you will work standards for everybody plantation gurus and you will blocked negotiating having most readily useful earnings or works conditions. It produced plantation works unattractive and lots of specialists opted to exit new ranches and isles, to look for top standards elsewhere. The us government reacted for the work shortage by making it more complicated to help you having experts to go out of the hawaiian islands, demanding health certificates and recharging costs for passports. When wages were to feel negotiated about fall out-of 1878, the new workers’ need have been denied, and you can this new harsh criteria for take a trip was in fact imposed. It started the latest thus-titled Fireburn riots, that have been known as biggest labor riot in Danish history, and you can during which over 50 ranches had been burnt.
Due to their particular role because a commander in uprising e as called “Queen Mary”. The employees picked their own and two almost every other female, “King Agnes” and “King Matilda”, because “queens” to execute routine and you will celebratory services in uprising. Queen Mary are arrested and experimented with together with other leadership of your labor uprising. At the demonstration of your work management Thomas was sentenced in order to passing for arson and you will looting however, had their phrase commuted to life imprisonment, and you will was relocated to Copenhagen and you may set within Ladies’ Prison, Christianshavn into the 1882, in 1887 is sent back so you can Christiansted, St. Croix so you can suffice with the rest of their sentence.
Anna Heegaard
Anna Heegaard stays an interesting shape in the Virgin Islands records. This woman is paid which have boosting criteria into the enslaved African and you can “100 % free Colored” society of your own Danish Western Indies regarding 19th century as a result of their own 20 year connection with the newest islands’ Governor Standard, Peter von Scholten.
According to the Encyclopedia regarding Antislavery & Abolition, “Heegard without a doubt swayed the fresh new direction having judge and personal equality having 100 % free black colored someone from the Danish West Indies.” Heegaard grew up in St. Croix inside January from 1790 to single parents known as good “free mulatto lady” and a beneficial Danish Bodies clerk. She spent my youth along with her mommy and you can half of sisters inside Christiansted. Heegard made use of her wits and you can charm to form liaisons that have St. Croix’s richest and you may powerful dudes, sooner or later crossing paths to the Governor-General shortly shortly after his coming for the 1827. From the that time, she got herself become a fairly successful lady.
Heegard in addition to Governor-General began appointment daily to go over brand new plight of your Free Colored population and she is said to have assisted him prepare a listing of public reforms he presented to the Danish King, just who appointed a payment to study and you will carry out the fresh new regulations for social justice for non-whites regarding D.W.We. . Reforms to the “unfree” in buy a wife from Haiti the course of time included – a managed period of workday, reduce of corporal abuse, banning regarding social slave deals, an excellent reprieve for pregnant women, facilities out-of schools and you can property developments. Von Scholten and additionally did to lift barriers free-of-charge black colored and you can coloured some one – setting all of them in public places ranking and you may holding racially included personal properties, to add his own dinner events presided over of the Heegard. They stayed because the guy and you can spouse for many out-of a couple of ily inside Denmark, and eventually the two settled on Bulows Minde Property Domestic away from Christiansted.
