That Denmark was once a slave-trading and slaveholding empire remains relatively little known outside of the former Danish West Indies, known since 1917 as the US Virgin Islands. Nor have the Danes been eager to acknowledge a chapter of history rather at odds with national self-understanding.Two initiatives of the National Archives — a 1999 reorganization and recataloging of the extensive archival material that had long sat undisturbed, and a large-scale digitization project of those records in anticipation of the 2017 centennial of the colony’s sale to the United States — have happily resulted in a wave of new research and, indeed, something of a national reckoning in the public sphere. While this process remains ongoing, a significant victory was achieved in 2018 with the erection in Copenhagen of a monument to Queen Mary, one of the three “Rebel Queens” who led a plantation workers’ revolt in 1878, remembered today as the Fireburn.Despite this new interest, one of the most significant events in the colony’s history has largely escaped historians’ attention: the early 1916 mass strike of plantation workers organized and led by the Danish West Indian labor leader David Hamilton Jackson. The first successful strike action of non-white workers in Caribbean history, the magnitude of this achievement cannot be overstated. Over the course of just a couple of months, with no real experience of labor organizing, thousands of plantation workers on the sugar-producing island of Sankt Croix (the colonial name of Saint Croix) came together and, just in time for harvest season, laid down their cane knives to a man. And even more astonishingly, in the face of near absolute intransigence from the planters, the workers of the Sankt Croix Labor Union managed to outlast and outwit their opponents.The events of 1915 and 1916 on Sankt Croix are of broader historical interest in their own right. But a further wrinkle in the story demands just as much attention:…
