Advertisement
Advertisement
Du Sable
[ doo sah-bluh, sahb, dyoo; French dy sah-bluh ]
noun
- Jean Bap·tiste Pointe [zhah, n, b, a, -, teest, pwa, n, t], 1745?–1818, U.S. pioneer trader, born in Haiti: early settler of Chicago.
Example Sentences
The panel recommended the city award $50,000 grants to artists for the development of ideas, including monuments honoring Pilsen Latinos, Mahalia Jackson, the Mother Jones Heritage Project, Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable and Kitihawa, his wife and a local Potawatomi woman.
A plaque honoring early Chicago settler John Kinzie should also be removed, the report said, because it “openly prioritizes whiteness and denies the existence of Native peoples, and earlier settler Jean Baptiste Point du Sable.”
Jean Baptiste Point du Sable was arrested, in 1779, by British soldiers who fought to conquer the land that its native people called Eschecagou.
I grew up in Chicago raised by an activist mother who force-fed her kids race pride, so of course I knew that the city’s first nonnative settler was a Black man, the Haitian fur trapper Jean Baptiste Point du Sable.
What I didn’t know was that du Sable was also the first Black man in Chicago to get locked up.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Browse