Whose Story?
Post by Inbal Harding - Curator, Diversifying Collections
Much of what we know about black communities in Britain’s past come to us through white commentators. Often these are passing comments in legal documents, snippets of information from private diaries and letters, or official documentation issued through Britain’s colonial administration. A variety of these sources exist in the special collections of the John Rylands Research Institute and Library. While the information gained through these sources is useful in showing the long history of a black presence in Britain and the different places and spaces that black communities occupied — it paints a partial, often prejudicial picture, tainted with the biases and agendas of its white authors.
However, there were published first-hand accounts of black lives in Britain, providing counter-narratives and personal experiences of moments in time we’ve come to know almost solely through a white lens. The earliest of these were written in the late 18th and early years of the 19th century as the abolitionist movement reached its zenith. These direct accounts from formerly enslaved black Africans were crucial evidence for the abolitionist movement and placed those with lived experience of a cruel and dehumanising system centrally in the campaign to end it.
There are several examples of autobiographical accounts from this period in the Rylands. Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano both wrote about their experiences as enslaved people and passionately and eloquently advocated for the abolition of slavery at the end of the 18th century. They were leading members of Sons of Africa, a London-based political activist group of previously enslaved men. The group held public meetings and wrote in newspapers. Equiano even petitioned parliament directly, as a representative of the Sons of Africa, calling for the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.
Living in London at the same time, Ignatius Sancho corresponded with many notable individuals in Georgian England. Sancho had come to the city as an enslaved child and was subsequently freed by the Duke of Montagu, who became his employer. Like Cugoano and Equiano, he was actively anti-abolitionist, but less publicly/politically so. In his posthumously published ‘letters’ his commentary on the transatlantic slave trade showed both his abject disgust at the trade and those who participated in it, but also his acknowledgement that, despite being a man of property and a scholar, his African heritage meant that he was not necessarily viewed as socially equal to his (white) peers.
On the other side of the Atlantic and over 50 years later in the mid-19th century, Henry ‘Box’ Brown’s escape from enslavement was particularly daring. Brown had himself posted in a wooden crate to the abolitionist state of Pennsylvania, securing his freedom. As a free man, he had a long career as an anti-abolition speaker in both the USA and England. Solomon Northup meanwhile, was born a free man but kidnapped and enslaved when he was around 30 years of age. Freed again after over a decade of enslavement, he wrote a memoir and toured on behalf of the anti-slavery movement, talking about his experiences. These American autobiographies show important differences — and similarities — in the experiences of black communities on both sides of the Atlantic. They allow us to explore the complexity and nuance of black experiences, which were impacted by time, place and shifting societal attitudes to race.
Writing their own stories was not the preserve of men. Phillis Wheatley was a poet who had been sold into slavery and taken from West Africa to America as a child. In the late 18th century, while travelling in London with the family who had bought her, she published a volume of poetry under the patronage of the Countess of Huntingdon. Wheatley’s poems — such as ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’ — were influenced by her life experiences and give us a glimpse into the personal complexities caused by physical and cultural dislocation and enslavement. After the publication of her poems, she was emancipated. Perhaps better known for her nursing in the Crimean War, Mary Seacole was also the first black woman in Britain to publish an autobiography. In her earlier life, Mary had travelled extensively, including to the USA, where she experienced first-hand the racism, violence and abuse that black people were subjected to in a country where slavery was still legal.
These autobiographical accounts give us first-hand testimony of how black men and women experienced Britain and the USA in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. However, it is important to recognise that not all those experiences were the same. Black women were doubly disadvantaged by their gender as well as their race. Men such as Ignatius Sancho mixed in very different circles to most of their fellow Africans on English soil. As a shopkeeper Sancho held property and therefore was entitled to vote, lifting him into a social sphere well above most men of any racial background at the time. Despite the racism she experienced, Mary Secole, whose father was Scottish, was acutely aware that the lighter colour of her skin gave her an advantage as she travelled around the British Empire. The complexities of life in Britain and the USA for black communities was underpinned by multiple and intersectional advantages and disadvantages that came to the fore at different times in peoples’ lives, all of which was shaped by shifting interests in the importance of race for British and American white society through the late 18th and 19th centuries.
Further Reading
The following books can all be found in the main campus library.
- For an overview of significant figures in black British history, see Patrick Vernon and Angelina Osbourne’s (2021) 100 Great Black Britons.
- For further information on black British writers, intellectuals and radicals of the 18th century, see Ryan Hanley’s (2018) Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, c.1770–1830.
- For an excellent general history of black British history from the earliest sources until the present day, see David Olusoga’s (2016) Black and British: A forgotten History. An updated version published in 2021 includes further chapters on the Windrush scandal and Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.
- Black British History: New Perspectives by Hakim Adi (2019) brings together numerous scholars of black British history into an edited volume spanning 1500 years of black presence in Britain.
Points for Discussion
- Are we always aware of who is ‘speaking’ to us through the pages? Think about the differing critical questions we might ask of sources from black and white authors in order to understand their influences, prejudices and agendas.
- How might the various authors’ lived experiences (e.g. whether they were born as enslaved or free individuals) influence their relationship to Britain and attitudes to race, which changed significantly from the late 18th to late 19th centuries?
Further Resources
There are several blogs on the Special Collections Medium site brought together under the heading of Colonialism and Decolonisation which include further links to the collections, external sources and points for discussion:
For further information on Ottobah Cugoano and Henry ‘Box’ Brown see Abolition In The Context Of Colonialism
The University of Manchester digitised Special Collections material is made available via a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC 4.0) wherever possible. For further information on digital images and to request high resolution copies please contact our imaging team.
