BLACK HISTORY MONTH EXHIBITION / The Pacific Ocean, as anyone who truly loves it can tell you, has an unusual magic about it. It sparkles unlike other seas and oceans and has a playfulness–even in its intense power–all its own. Those who know the Pacific well will insist it absorbs the colors of the land and sky around it more deeply and with more richness than other great bodies of water. Its waves can renew the dampest spirits and refresh the cloudiest minds. To many 19th-century African slaves, it was the Pacific that set them free.

To commemorate Black History Month, the African American Diversity Cultural Center Hawaii (AADCCH) is again presenting an exhibit at Honolulu Hale devoted to local black history. Artifacts and photographs tell the stories of many black people who endured slavery in the United States, took grueling jobs as ship hands, then abandoned their vessels in the port of Honolulu.

“Records show there were about three dozen black men who jumped ship and started families with Hawaiian women,” says Deloris Guttman of the AADCCH. “Their children and their children’s children are all of African descent. Some people in Hawaii are aware of their African background, but others really are not.”

Guttman says there is a widespread lack of awareness about the black community’s prevalence in early Hawaii and how long that community has actually been here.

“There is absolutely no awareness,” says Guttman. “That’s why we’re doing everything we can. The center doesn’t have the resources backing us like the black communities on the mainland, where the big businesses have always gotten behind the black cause. It’s hard for us.”

She says the exhibit at Honolulu Hale–now in its third year–provides an opportunity to show people that the history of black people in Hawaii is inextricable from the greater history of the Islands.

“The black story is the story of Hawaii,” says Guttman. “Hawaii has grown with the contributions of blacks since the early 1800s.”

Hawaii’s early black residents were landowners, farmers, hotel owners, doctors, tailors, restauranteurs. They opened bars and bowling alleys. And it was a black unit of the military that created the 18-mile trail up Mauna Loa on the Big Island. Some of them taught their children to read well before the arrival of the missionaries–who are now credited with teaching literacy in Hawaii. Most importantly for Hawaii’s black residents of the time, they were respected as equals.

“The Hawaiian people weren’t brainwashed against blacks at that time,” says Guttman. “There was no obstacle. They had dark skin like the king! Kamehameha looked like them. They were accepted as brothers.”

While Guttman points out that racism against blacks did eventually seep into local culture, in the 1800s, Hawaiʻi offered former slaves the chance to regain independence, to be treated humanly and to live freely.

“Hawaii represented freedom,” says Guttman. “Freedom! It was truly a voyage to freedom.”