page_title: Black people in Cambridge
section_title: Eighteenth century
hierarchical_section_title: Black people in Cambridge / Eighteenth century
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Olaudah Equiano, autrement dit "Gustavus Vassa", par Daniel Orme, after W. Denton, Londres 1789
context_page_description: The history of black people in Cambridge, UK cannot easily be separated from the history of Cambridge University. The university has attracted students from Africa and the African diaspora to the town of Cambridge for over two centuries. Several notable black people had a Cambridge association in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and at the end of the eighteenth century Cambridge became a centre of abolitionist sentiment. From the end of the nineteenth century the university started to admit black students in larger numbers. In recent decades, however, the relatively low number of black students admitted to the university has become a topic of media comment and public concern.
  The lives of Cambridge-born black people are less fully documented than those of Cambridge students. In the 2011 census 1.7% of people were Black British, and 1.0% of mixed ethnicity with black ancestry.
context_section_description: The poet and scholar Francis Williams, born to a free black Jamaican couple, is the first recorded black writer in the British Empire. According to Edward Long, the Jamaican historian and apologist for slavery, Williams was educated at a grammar school and at Cambridge University, as an educational experiment paid for by John Montagu, 2nd Duke of Montagu. This would make Williams the first black person to study at Cambridge. However, while Williams was certainly sent to England for his education, there is no independent evidence of Montagu's financial involvement, or of Williams actually attending Cambridge. 
  After the 1781 Zong massacre, the white Cambridge fellow Peter Peckard began preaching and pamphleteering against slavery. In 1782 Cambridge University Press published the Letters of the ex-slave and composer Ignatius Sancho. In 1785 Peckard set a Latin essay competition on the topic Anne liceat invitos in servitutem dare ("is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will?"). Thomas Clarkson, who had recently graduated from the university, won the competition with an anti-slavery essay which he translated and published as a pamphlet the following year. 
  In 1792 the ex-slave, autobiographer and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano (also known as Gustavus Vassa) married Susanna Cullen of Soham, Cambridgeshire, and the couple set up home in Soham. Their elder daughter Anna died, aged 4, in 1797, and a stone plaque was set up outside St Andrew's Church, Chesterton:
               Near this Place lies Interred
  
                    ANNA MARIA VASSA
  
     Daughter of GUSTAVUS VASSA, the African
  
                   She died July 21 1797
  
                        Aged 4 Years
  
    Should simple village rhymes attract thine eye,
  
    Stranger, as thoughtfully thou passest by,
  
    Know that there lies beside this humble stone
  
    A child of colour haply not thine own.
  
    Her father born of Afric’s sun-burnt race,
  
    Torn from his native field, ah foul disgrace:
  
    Through various toils, at length to Britain came
  
    Espoused, so Heaven ordain’d, an English dame,
  
    And follow’d Christ; their hope two infants dear.
  
    But one, a hapless orphan, slumbers here.
  
    To bury her the village children came.
  
    And dropp’d choice flowers, and lisp’d her early fame;
  
    And some that lov’d her most, as if unblest,
  
    Bedew’d with tears the white wreath on their breast;
  
    But she is gone and dwells in that abode,
  
    Where some of every clime shall joy in God.
caption: Frontispiece of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
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