Anthony D. Allen, an African American in Hawai‘i
Many African Americans found their way to the Island kingdom after Western contact: stone masons, tailors, cooks, teachers, laborers, missionaries. They were received hospitably by the Hawaiians, and some were taken under the care of chiefs. The notable Anthony D. Allen, from Schenectady, New York, is the best known.
Allen was born in 1774. His mother was likely a slave and his father a freeman and a mariner. Allen himself was freed at 24 through a combination of skill and luck (New York was a slave state until 1799), and he fled to Boston. Like his father before him, he shipped out—to China, the West Indies, the Northwest Coast of America—and to Hawai‘i, where he settled in 1810 or 1811.
Called Alani by the Native Hawaiians, he served as steward to Kamehameha the Great and acquired a parcel of land from the High Priest Hewa Hewa—some six acres in Waikiki. Allen married a Hawaiian woman, and three of their children survived into adulthood and themselves had children.
Allen was a successful businessman and farmer. He kept his own cattle and horses and boarded others, ran a boarding house, a bowling alley, and even a hospital—he had likely picked up medical skills in Schenectady—where ill or injured seamen and sea captains could recuperate ashore. He was respected and admired by missionaries, other residents, visitors, and Native Hawaiians alike.
After a long and prosperous life, Allen suffered a stroke in December of 1835 and was buried near his Waikiki dwelling. Marc Scruggs, a local resident, researched and published his story in the 1992 Hawaiian Journal of History.