As part of the Bahamas’ 51st Independence Day celebrations on July 10th, the country has posthumously bestowed the title of National Hero on the slave Kate Moss. 

This was announced by the Bahamian Office of the Governor General in an official statement.

The country’s National Honours Committee recognized Moss’s ‘timely and determined courage demonstrated against racism and slavery’, and thus deemed it fit to make her a national heroine.

Kate Moss was an African slave girl who lived on Crooked Island in the 1820s. She, along with dozens of others, were the property of Henry and Helen Moss, a rich and powerful couple that owned a wealthy plantation.

Kate served as one of many house slaves for the couple, tasked with preparing meals, washing and mending clothes, and keeping the Moss residence clean.

Though given these responsibilities by the Moss family, Kate would prove to be an obstinate woman.

She refused to do any of the jobs assigned to her by her slave masters, from repairing clothing to serving food. This was done in spite of the efforts of Henry and Helen Moss, who took to more cruel schemes and strategies to force Kate to fall in line.

Accused of insolence, theft, and insubordination, Kate would be shackled and left in isolation, hot burning peppers forced into her eyes, starved of food and denied water, and then flogged, with Kate’s own father being forced to carry out the whipping. In spite of all of this, Kate’s resolve did not falter.

Henry and Helen Moss then decided to send Kate out of the Great House and to work in the fields, but having been severely weakened, she later collapsed and died from exhaustion. 

When the news of Kate’s death reached the United Kingdom, it sparked general outrage amongst the general populace, with abolitionists platforming her as the martyred ‘Poor Black Kate’.

The authorities in the Bahamian capital of Nassau would fine the Moss couple £300 pounds, over £36,000 pounds in today’s money, when accounting for inflation. Henry and Helen Moss would also be forced to spend five months in Nassau’s common jail.

“Kate’s actions to stand up for herself became an act of defiance that significantly impacted the abolition of slavery worldwide and must never be forgotten,” emphasized the statement by the Office of the Governor General.

The story of Kate Moss, her passive resistance, and her subsequent death played a significant part in the growing anti-slavery sentiment and lobby in the United Kingdom during the early 19th century.

Her actions contributed to the eventual emancipation of the enslaved, an effort spearheaded by politicians such as William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, Thomas Foxwell Buxton, and others.