Advocates of Freedom
Channel: British Library
Date: 2020-12-07

The African American activists who took Victorian Britain by storm

During the nineteenth century, African American activists like Frederick Douglass, Moses Roper and Ellen Craft made radical and politicized journeys to the British Isles to inform the Victorian public about US slavery, racism, and white domestic terrorism. As advocates of freedom, social justice and equality, they travelled the length and breadth of the country to galvanise antislavery momentum and maximise the success of the abolitionist movement in the US. In doing so, they challenged pro-slavery defenders on both sides of the Atlantic and exposed British racism and colonialism to transatlantic audiences.

Join Dr Hannah-Rose Murray to discover how and why some of the most iconic American abolitionists of the Civil War era crossed the Atlantic and found their way to Britain, and the impact these activists had on British society.

Hannah-Rose Murray is the author of Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles, recently published by Cambridge University Press. She is currently an Early Career Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. In 2016 she was an Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow at the British Library, and was a finalist in the British Library Labs competition to support innovation in digital scholarship using the Library’s collections. See her website, for her mapping project and for information on her virtual and in-person Black Abolitionist Walking Tours of London.

Presented in collaboration with the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library