🇧🇲 Bermuda
Mary Prince Day is a public holiday in Bermuda, observed on the Friday before the first Monday in August as part of the Cup Match holiday weekend. It honors Mary Prince, a Bermudian-born woman who was enslaved as a child and later published the first known autobiography by a Black woman describing the experience of slavery in the British Empire.
On Mary Prince Day, Bermuda closes government offices, schools, and most businesses for the second day of the two-day Cup Match holiday. The occasion centers on the annual Cup Match cricket festival, a rivalry between the St. George's and Somerset cricket clubs that draws large crowds to whichever end of the island is hosting that year. Many residents also head to Mangrove Bay in Somerset for the Non-Mariners Race, a lighthearted contest for homemade boats that are not built to float.
The holiday exists to honor Mary Prince, who was born into slavery in Bermuda around 1788 and endured brutal treatment while enslaved across Bermuda, Turks Islands, and Antigua before reaching England in 1828. There she dictated her life story, published in 1831 as The History of Mary Prince, the first account of a Black woman's experience of slavery to appear in Britain. Its firsthand testimony strengthened the British anti-slavery movement at a time when slavery remained legal throughout the Caribbean colonies. Bermuda renamed the day from Somers Day, which had honored English admiral Sir George Somers, to Mary Prince Day in 2020, shifting recognition toward her legacy.
Mary Prince Day keeps a once-overlooked figure at the center of Bermuda's most anticipated holiday weekend, prompting renewed public interest in her autobiography and its place in abolitionist history. Coming during Cup Match, when much of the island pauses for cricket and community celebration, the holiday's name is a yearly reminder that the same week also honors resistance to slavery, not only the sport and festivities that surround it.
A 2023 painting of Mary Prince dictating her memoir inspired an award-winning 2025 documentary by Bermudian filmmaker Ari Kamara.
Mary Prince Day falls on the Friday of Bermuda's Cup Match weekend, immediately after Emancipation Day on the Thursday, so the two days together anchor the same emancipation commemoration found across the former British Caribbean, where similar August observances mark the end of slavery in the British Empire in 1834.
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