"Pōpolo" (cognate to Māori: poroporo)[1] means blackberry in Hawaiian referring to the black nightshade, it can also be used to describe a lobelia or a pokeberry.
[7] A former slave who accompanied the American Protestant missionaries to Hawaii, Betsey Stockton started the first mission school in Lahaina open to the common people.
The thought of the four million slaves suddenly thrust onto the open market prompted Hawaiian Foreign Minister Robert Crichton Wyllie to write to a prominent friend in Boston, "We could perhaps admit with advantage to ourselves, say 20,000 freed Negroes, pay them the wages and give them the treatment of free men."
Fortunately for the Africans, their dark skin categorized them as "Brown" people, a category mostly comprising Hawaiians and Polynesians.
[11] Since annexation, the immigration barriers were lifted and attempts were made to bring laborers of African descent from Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama to Hawaii to work the sugarcane plantations.
[12] Despite the horrid conditions at the bottom of society, most Africans were acquainted with the Western world either from life in the United States or in Colonial Africa.
As Hawaii was Americanized during the Territorial period, Africans could identify opportunities that went unnoticed by other groups not acquainted with the Western system.
Several African Americans including Frank M. Davis were able to relate to the plight of the Black race on the US continent and participated in the "Bloodless Revolution" that overthrew the rule of Hawaii's White minority and the race-class structure of the Territory.