Enslaved African royal honored as patriot and Newark’s 1st Black business owner

STEVE STRUNSKY

After getting off work, Christopher Seals was enjoying a sunny afternoon in the plaza outside the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark.

He hadn’t noticed the historical marker a few feet away, almost hidden among a row of saplings, honoring Cudjo Banquante, an enslaved Black man born in Ghana of royal blood who gained his freedom by fighting in the American Revolution in place of his white enslaver.

With an acre of land he received with his freedom, located just across what is now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard from the future site of Newark Arts High School, Banquante became what historians say was Newark’s first documented Black business owner, starting a horticultural business long before New Jersey became the last Northern state to abolish slavery.

“I didn’t know who he was,” said Seals, 57, who lives in Newark and works delivering food to local pantries and soup kitchens. “That’s a great achievement.” The Daughters of the American Revolution think so, too.

The Morristown chapter of the 135-year-old Washington, D.C.-based group erected the marker last spring near Banquante’s Newark burial place in a cemetery that once occupied the NJPAC site. The marker credits the Morristown DAR chapter and the William G Pomeroy Foundation, which provided a grant to create and install it.

“He’s on tax rolls and in newspaper articles, ”Linda Caldwell Epps, a social historian who worked on the project, said of records of Banquante’s business. “As far as we know, he might be the first one for the state of New Jersey.”

In September, the New Jersey Council on the Humanities announced it had awarded the Morristown chapter the 2025 Stanley N. Katz Prize for Excellence in Public Humanities, for having “demonstrated significant engagement with and impact through community-focused public humanities work in New Jersey.”

“Revolutionary America 1775-1783,” reads the blue and gold marker. “Cudjo Banquante, early black business owner granted freedom & land for service as a substitute soldier when enslaved. Buried near here 5 March 1823.”

The placement of the marker and the humanities award came several months after the chapter held a symposium, “Honoring Cudjo Banquante,” funded by a grant from the humanities council.

It included several events at NJPAC, the Newark Public Library, and the New Jersey Historical Society, featuring presentations by historians, a Black Revolutionary War re-enactor, traditional Ghanaian song and dance, Banquante family descendants from Ohio, and Banquante’s Ghanaian biographer, Kofi Ayim.

“Cudjo’s last name, ‘Bakwante,’ inadvertently spelled/written as Banquante/Baquanto/Baquanty, etc, has been known to be used exclusively by the royals of Akyem Abuakwa from Gold Coast time to present day Ghana,” Ayim told NJ Advance Media in an email, referring to the former British colony that’s now part of the West African nation.

“In fact, the 14th king of the people of Akyem was called Baa Kwante (Banquante) Agyeman.”

Ayim said research could not unearth just how Banquante was enslaved, but that he was likely captured by a rival tribal community as a result of a conflict, and sold to slavers. “Cudjo — if old enough in 1742 — could have been captured in a war between the Asante and Akyem, in which the latter was defeated,” Ayim said.

Ayim places his birth at 1723, which would have made him 100 when he died in Newark.

An oil painting by John Phillip Osborne, commissioned by the DAR for the occasion, depicts Banquante with white compatriots fighting under Washington, the new nation’s first president and one of its most widely known slaveholders.

The recognition of Banquante was welcomed by Barima Gyansi Korie, the traditional ruler, or chief, of the Kyebi-Ahwenease region, where Banquante was born.

“We are forever grateful and very appreciative of the efforts of the DAR to honor our dear Grandpa with a Marker and publication of his resiliency in life,” Korie told NJAM in an email. “In fact, I represented the Asona Royal family and the Kingdom of Akyem Abuakwa on the Planning Committee of the Honoring Cudjo Banquante effort.”

The Daughters of the American Revolution was founded in 1890 by women eager to preserve Revolutionary history, including the memories of those who fought in or otherwise aided in America’s war of independence from its British colonizers.

Especially their own forbearers. To be accepted into the nonprofit organization, all 190,000 members in 3,000 chapters nationwide had to document their lineage back to soldiers or others who funded, supplied, or otherwise directly aided the war effort.

But until recent decades, the organization had a history of discrimination against people of color as members, honorees, or even performers at its galas.

And honoring a “patriot of color,” as the DAR now refers to Black and Native American Revolutionary War veterans, would have been unheard of at the time of the group’s founding in 1890.

It was nearly a century after the group’s founding that Karen Batchelor of Detroit was admitted as the DAR’s first Black member in 1977, and another 7 years before the national organization barred chapters from discriminating on the basis of race or creed.

“We know we are certainly underrecognizing Black patriots,” said Bobbi Bailey, a DAR member who in 2022 began the campaign to honor Banquante. “Twenty-five percent of Washington’s Army was people of color.”

Baily, a state DAR official who lives in Randolph, was working on a database of Morris County’s 2,100 Revolutionary War veterans when she was intrigued by one soldier’s atypical name.

“They were mostly names like Pearson, or Sayer, or Caldwell,” she said. “And then I found this ‘Jack Cudjo’ in Morristown. And I said, ‘What the Heck? Who is this Jack Cudjo? That doesn’t sound like any of the other names.”

A Google search led her to Ayim’s 2012 book, “Jack Cudjo: Newark’s Revolutionary Soldier and First Black Businessman,” which uses an alternate version of Banquante’s name.

She couldn’t locate a suitable site in Morristown, home of then-Gen. George Washington’s headquarters from December 1779 to June 1780, where Cudjo spent time during the war. So she and others decided to place the marker in his hometown of Newark.

Banquante’s tribute reflects DAR’s efforts to diversify its membership and those it honors. Those efforts include the E Pluribus Unum Education Initiative, launched in 2020, which borrows the “Out of Many, One” motto from U.S. currency.

It aims to “increase awareness of often underrepresented Revolutionary War patriots, including those who were African American, Native American and female.”

Back on the NJPAC plaza, Christopher Seals took out his phone after reading the Banquante marker and asked Gemini for more information on the Black patriot. “Obviously, he was great,” said Seals. “To run a business, then? A Black man? Wow.”

“That inspires me, “seals added, determined to spread the word. “I’m gonna bring some people today.”

NJ.COM