and then it's seen without the recording that I'd see. My mission to have a little bit of understanding. Yeah. The new thing is to go on top in the back of the story. I click the webcam because I'm using my webcam. I don't take the webcam because I'm going to stream it. I'm not using screen sharing. It's maybe that large. It would be cool to click if you can read slides. And it would be nice if somebody could confirm that it's working and that you're hearing me correctly. And if the technical things are out of the way, we can get started. OK. Your quality is perfect. But I don't know what to do about it. Start the audio. If it's very annoying, so without it for a second. Is this better? OK. So I'm trying with the AirPods. Maybe this is better. All right. OK. Thank you, Apple. So I'm going to share my screen again. So it helps to click the blue button on the top right of the slide. And then you can see the presentation in full. And with all of those audio problems out of the way, we can get started. My session is called Success Through Openness in Design. And my name is Johan. I'm a designer. I work for a company called Mono, also known as Mono Company on Twitter.  We are seven people strong. And we've been around for seven years. We design digital products and services. And it looks like the work we do on the left side, you can see a video editing application on the right side. You can see a planner application for schools to plan their lessons. And I sometimes jokingly say that all I do every day is draw boxes and arrows and connect things together. As a designer, I'm always thinking about where should the button go? What is the content of the screen? How do you go from screen to screen? And I find that overall, the last few years, the overall quality of software and digital experience has been getting much better. So if you're Belgian and you have to do your taxes, you might remember the screen on the left, which is the EID middleware. And it was a terrible experience to log into the federal government, your EID. And now things have gone better through It's Me. And I think overall, the last few years, there's been like a big baseline quality improvement in design. So the general level of things that are being put out there is much bigger. And firms, companies have also decided to share their design more. So on the top left, you can see IBM's Carbon Design System. On the bottom right, you can see Shopify's Polaris Design System. And these companies have decided to share their code publicly, to share their design system publicly, so that anyone can access it, learn from it, and maybe use some of it in their own work, either as inspiration or sometimes completely with very permissive licenses. As a designer, I always encounter specific problems. For example, a few weeks ago, I was working on a system where it was about days. So I had to find a way to ask someone for their birth date. And this is a similar pattern on Gov.UK, where they asked the question, when was your passport issued? So you see that the design solution that they have is to ask for day, month, and year in three separate fields. Now, there are so many ways you can tackle this problem. If you look at how other companies did it, like for example, LinkedIn, they have this very complex picker where you can pick between first the range of dates, and then depending on the range of dates, you will also get a double date picker. So the question is, what is the best pattern at the right time? And as a designer, I am immensely thankful to have all of these design systems out there that I can reference and check their research. I am also big on sharing myself as a designer. On the bottom right, you can see a photo from a design systems event that we held in Ghent. You know, and we could still hold real life events. And on the top left, you can see my GitHub profile where I post a lot of open source projects and things that I'm playing with. And I think I like this sharing because it allows me to learn. From others, it gets me into a conversation with others. And I strongly believe that work becomes better when it's discussed. So when there are multiple eyes on a problem, when there are many people discussing something, that's when work can get much better. And there's a certain evolution in the sharing of work. We had open source code for a long time, but now there's also more and more design being shared. One of my favorite apps is called Figma. So that's the app icon for one of my favorite design apps, Figma. They decided that it's super important to focus on community. So Figma, it's an application that you can use to design things. It's like Photoshop or Sketch. You can use it to design, but you can design together. So it's a bit like Google Docs. But for design, if you've used Miro, Miro the platform, it's similar, but it's more like a professional design tool where you can work together. But Figma decided that community is so important that they made it one of their pillars for their product design last year. Focusing hugely on community and sharing of design, remixing other designs work. And whenever you publish something on the Figma community, you do it with a permissive license, so a Creative Commons license, CC by Attribute, for those who know their C license. And it means that whenever you share something, that others can use it as long as they credit you. And we've also been publishing as a company some design things on our Ad Mono account. And for now, we've published mono icons. We've published mono devices, which are device frames, and another resource. And I think the sharing of design is so important. So maybe for those who don't know what a design system is, because I'm talking design system here, design system there, and you might wonder what is it talking about? What is a design system? It's a cohesive set of principles, design patterns, and guidelines that allow people to work together, to work on digital experiences. So for example, the people at IBM, so that's the top left, or the people at Shopify, that's the bottom right. They have this documentation website that tens, hundreds of people maybe worked on together to unify what a Shopify app looks like, or what does an IBM app look like. And it doesn't, it's not only private companies that do this, governments do it as well. In the Netherlands, there is projects that is starting, that it's about starting a Netherlands design system. So if the Dutch government has to make an application, what does it look like? How would it work? It's an early phase. This is a website to promote the idea. And on this slide, you can see a previous version of the design. This is not what it's going to be in the end. It's one of the projects that started the idea of why don't we take this work, and why don't we share it with a wider community. What they did was set up a slide where they are discussing the design system, and the community is quite active holding round tables and events and talking to each other to try and figure out how to do this. I think that's quite interesting. And it reminds me a lot of the Gov.UK design system. So Gov.UK, the redesign of Gov.UK is about 10 years old. 2011, they launched this website. And if you compare it to in Belgium, it's a bit comparable to the Vlandro.be website or federallevelbelgium.be website. So you go there to get information about your passport, about driver's license, about life stuff. And then on the right side of this slide, you can see the homepage for the Gov.UK design system. So from that project, a design system was born, which is now used to power a lot of government projects in the UK. So I think they are quite good when it comes to implementing a government-wide design system in the UK. And the team behind this is called the GDS Government Digital Service. And they have been quite prolific in sharing everything that they learn. So they built up a community. They have a lot of blog posts. I remember a time when someone from GDS came to speak in Antwerp and to promote what they learned as a group about the government lens of a design system, about how to do this in general. And I think what they achieved is brilliant. They unified over 2,000 websites with a different look, a different experience to use the GDS-made design system, so the Gov.UK design system. And if you look a bit deeper, it's really cool what they do. So for example, if you look into a design pattern or a component, they have a cookie banner. I don't like cookie banners, so it's just an example. But if you look at how they do things, I think it's quite mature. They have a design page about the cookie banner, where it says that in this case that it's an experimental component. You can get the code there. You can get the design for that component there. But there is also like a whole GitHub discussion about that component. So if you want to know why the design is the way it is, you can read the whole discussion on GitHub, which is I took the screenshots more than 20 pages long, if you would print it out. And that's all the research that people put behind this, all the opinions on the page. So the evolution of the design is effectively being tracked. And this prevents people from reinventing the wheel all over again. Based on the research, you get to a pattern. The pattern gets validated. Through testing, usability testing, user testing, and through community discussion. And then this pattern is ready to get shared with a wider audience. But I want to bring this back to Belgium. In Belgium, I think there are a lot of strong open source initiatives in the development world. But if it comes to design, there's not that many in the development world. There's FOSTA, a yearly conference about open source initiatives. There's Drupal, which was founded by a Belgian. There are initiatives like Open Summer of Code and Apps for Gent. There's an upcoming initiative from the government about working with solid and data faults. But if I look at design or open design initiatives in Belgium, there are initiatives. And I think that's a bit of a shame if you look at where things are going. We're going with a review plan from Europe, where we're going politics-wise with the plans from the federal government about making things more digital. Then I think we have a lot of work on the table. So my proposal would be to take a queue from Gov.uk and also from the Dutch people who already started their project and think about maybe we should create a Belgian design system. And one Sunday I was very ambitious, I think. I just started creating it. I made a proof-of-concept for the federal level brand guidelines in Belgium. So that was the start because I thought, first we need the brand, right? And I was a bit overly ambitious, I think. I worked on it a few hours and realized that this is not going to be a big job. But I looked at the logo, I don't like this logo. Maybe we should change it. And then I looked at the InfoCorona virus website and I was like, why is the line length so long and what is that ugly banner doing there? We should really focus a bit more and work on the typography and try to take my designer's eye and look at things and think about where we could go. And this is by no means a finished work, of course. You can see there's a lot of placeholders and it's really a start, it's really nothing. It's only a couple of hours of work. But I quickly realized that this is not a weakened project. This is a community effort and this is something that we will have to do together with the whole of Belgium. So it reminded me of this proverb, if you want to go fast, go along. If you want to go far, go together. So I believe that we need to work on putting more design out in the open, whether it's government or from private companies. And this open design documentation will really help us forward to increase the level of design in Belgium. I want to talk about community models so that we can have a wider community that contributes to a bigger system like the Gov.uk. I would like that people think about reusability, that we don't reinvent the wheel all the time and that we think about reusable components that are accessible, that are performance, that people can take from a system and that they don't have to start from scratch anymore. A final point I want to make is that I think taxpayer money, public money should lead to public good, where I believe at the moment not enough of the work that we're doing is being shared out in the open even though it's paid by public money. So I have a question for the whole audience. Next up, there's going to be some discussion where I also have some questions for you. But in general, I think my message is what are we waiting for? Let's make a Belgian design system and let's make it awesome. Thanks. Okay. So these are my slides. And now I can invite everyone to connect their audio if they want to, maybe ask it. You have to set up something for that. And I... Everyone should be able to connect with the audio. All right. Cool. I hope you enjoyed the presentation.  Let's get the conversation started to talk about design. You can also put on your webcam if you want. That's a feature, right? Astrid? Yes, but I will enable that right now. Cool. So audio or video you can choose. And if you have a comment about the presentation, that would be welcome. Or an answer to the question here, how can we encourage sharing design across companies and organizations? That's the first thing that I'm wondering like why don't people share their designs more for us? Encourage that sharing. In order to say something, you have to unmute yourself. It's the first button in the row where you have the microphone. And if you are too shy, you can also put your question in the chat. I am wondering, Johan, what do you think are the main obstacles for people not sharing or for a Belgian open design system? So that's actually my further point. I think main obstacles for a Belgian design system are that there are different levels. So federal, regional level. And they have to work together. So that's a Belgian problem. But I thought about it and actually every country has this problem in the UK. There are different parts of the UK, Wales, England, Scotland, Northern Ireland. So, I mean, they did it. And then in Dutch, in the Netherlands, there's also the REX overhead and then the local governments, different levels. I think different levels are the main problem. Another problem I think is that people don't really value design that much. So it's a bit of an unknown that we should invest in it. That's also something. Thanks. I see that Anton and Dieter connected to their audio. Maybe they want to ask a question. Hi. I'm not sure if you can hear me, right? Yes. All right. Perfect. First of all, great presentation. Thanks a lot. I have a question. Where do we sign up? I am jokingly, of course, but no, I think it's a really nice initiative. I was also, I had a question because you mentioned there are a lot of design systems out there. A lot of big companies, tech companies, publish their own design system. What would make a Belgian design system, a Belgian design system, for example, if the UK has a great system, maybe why not borrow their design system, for example? Maybe it's a bit of a hypothetical question but maybe something to, what would make Belgium's design system unique in a way is perhaps my question. I think if you look at it objectively, there are good parts to the UK design system but if you copy-paste it, you don't have anything yet because I think what we need to do is work on a wider community that uses the same system. So the real product is the wider community that uses the system. It's not about that. I had my Sunday experiment there and it's not about the perfect design file. I could theoretically work on it for six months and come up with the perfect design but it's worth nothing if it's shared and it should also be built together. So people in the Netherlands, I had a chat with someone, they really thought about this and they already went through that route of making the perfect thing on their own but they realized it's more like a community effort and that agencies, different parts of the government, they have to get on board with this community effort. First, it doesn't matter if you have a perfect system, it's more about creating a system together and then it's becoming a viable thing. I agree. I think that's the biggest hurdle. Thanks. All right, cool. Does anybody else want to ask a question or chime in with their esteemed question? Hi. Hi. There's something I'm wondering and I've talked about it a lot. We talk about design systems and most of the things we see are actually like component libraries and like UI kits. I think it's more interesting to think about the design system as the governance and the community, especially if you talk about something like a Belgium design system but how would you like organize that? Is there somebody maintaining the community? Who's an elite? That's mostly my question. I think it's quite an interesting question. It's also the most difficult question, to do it. I showed a bit of governance stuff with the GitHub issues where the cookie banner was being discussed but I think it's much wider than opening it up code-wise or design-file-wise. There's going to need to do community events. There's going to need to be people who are backing it up and who think within their professional position putting time into it makes sense. I think if people realize that over a longer period we will invest in a Belgium design system as a group or like a good Flemish design system, a good Wadoen design system, then we can really go further and having those conversations, talking to each other about it, using it and sharing. Perhaps already starting with sharing things more publicly when we do work can already help. I think the governance aspect and who is in the lead is quite a difficult one. Ideally it gets decided top-down by the government themselves that they want to invest in it. But another way it could happen is that it's bottom-up that enough people decide that it's a good idea and a good result could then be over there how to say this could then be it could be used as a base for the real Belgium design system because there was already a community effort. That's the two approaches that I'm thinking about. I think the bottom-up is interesting. The community is missing, I guess. I wonder how we can create it without somebody from the government leading it. Because there's already some sort of design system or component library. It's very close. Maybe if you can show an example of how it could be done. It would be interesting. I have another question but maybe somebody else wants to. Maybe I'm going to answer Raphael's question first. He says, don't have mic access. Let's say we end up with a very solid system worked on by lots of designers. How easily do you think it will translate to government use? I think it will be a real challenge. And not super clear on what the question is there. But getting a system adopted, I think that's the question. Getting it adopted for real. That's going to be the real challenge because you can make a system but you have to work on adoption. One difficulty is that everyone has their own needs. Maybe there are already requirements in place that different people want. You have differences between local government and regional government and federal government. They all have different requirements. So working together and finding a way to maybe have variants of the same system that will be a challenge. But I think if we get it started we can improve the overall quality of the websites that we visit. If you now visit the financials website from the federal government or the one from public health or coronavirus they are all different and I think it's good work if they all start from the same idea, the same design system. If anybody else has a question I'm just going to wait 20 seconds and then later you can take a question if nobody responds if that's all right. So no new people are coming in with a question later if you want. Go ahead. I'll try to follow up with Rafael's question wise. Regarding adoption of design like the components because everybody has different needs it will be difficult to align like there's lots of opinions like how could we get along building different versions of things that still have like sharing those things. Somebody needs a very complex upload field for example another one is a very simple one like size applications will change so I'm thinking maybe towards something like Spotify does with their approach I wonder what your thoughts are. I think there's different needs there's content website needs there are application like needs there's also something in between which is like where you maybe register for a driver's license so that's like a usable form on a website and I think you will need variants of your design system for those let's say the backend type of app where you have a lot of data entry and where you are working in every day it will look different and a public website which is about information and it will look slightly different from a form type website where you have to where you're interacting with a service online so I think all of those can be split up into different design systems if you look at Shopify they realized pretty quickly that they have a design system for the back office of the shops but they also have a separate design system for the point of sale for mobile so I don't think one design system is the answer but sharing of design systems definitely is the answer so if it's closed closed source if it's locked behind doors then nobody can remix it nobody can take inspiration from it so I think to make it more like a natural evolution let's say somebody makes an app for the federal government and they happen to make a design system while creating it why don't they put it online publicly and share that idea with other people who are working with federal government it's maybe a bit idealistic that they could merge the two code base or use the same design logic as a base but I think maybe if people start doing it it could something could start that's what I'm thinking alright so that's all about belgium design system maybe I want to take it a bit broader and talk about how open design could help in belgium maybe people are working in a specific field where it would help if there is more open design so if anybody has a comment on this one feel free to let me know and then we can discuss it for me personally the icons that you published with mono were already super interesting and I use I forgot the name of the tool for icons with these kinds of open design it's really useful for at least my work with an open knowledge belgium and as a non designer so that's more like free assets that you can use which are helpful right so Tor has a comment a non design example on the bottom on the bottom up approach right very interesting I'll definitely read that article so maybe people are working in different fields medical government something else and if you have any idea about maybe how design is opening up within your space if you have a comment about it feel free to in the chat if there's a general question about the other three topics how can we make belgium design system a reality or the one that has not been on the screen so far much how can we encourage sharing and design across companies and organizations they are welcome we'll be closing the session in eight minutes or if there are no more questions we will just stop it here so I'm just going to give it a few moments if somebody wants to say something I will take that as a no so I want to thank everyone for attending the session I hope that I'm inspiring a little bit to start this idea of a belgium design system I hope that people will maybe think about okay I have this project here why don't I put the source code on github I have this design file here in Figma why don't I share it on the community page on Figma Astrid if you want to you can also take over and talk about open belgium in the coming sessions but if if we're closing in town I hope people will get some inspiration from this to maybe if we can get back together physically maybe we should have a hack day Anton you asked how can we sign up there's no sign up yet but I hope that the idea becomes something that people start thinking about and I can just refer to our website openbelgium.be where you can see the full program and you can still sign up for all the other sessions and thank you everyone for joining this session and I hope to see you at the later one as well and I see that you're recording that


Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Philip Abraham and I'm from the Eccles Center for American Studies at the British Library, and it's my real delight to welcome you to tonight's event, which is, in effect, a launch of Hannah Rose Murray's new book, Advocates of Freedom, African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles. For those of you tuning in who don't know what the Eccles Center is, we are a research centre based in the British Library that is charged with supporting learning and enjoyment of the cultures of Canada, the USA and the Caribbean, through the collections of the British Library. We do this through a variety of means, including public events like this, schools workshops, academic collaborations, and a programme of funded library fellowships. And as Hannah Rose Murray is a past Eccles Center visiting fellow at the British Library, I'm particularly thrilled to be hosting this event for tonight. Dr Hannah Rose Murray is currently a Leave a Human Early Career Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and she had her PhD research at the University of Nottingham. Advocates of Freedom was published only in September by Cambridge University Press and it really is a marvellous, very, very, very timely book. So I would urge those of you who can to recommend it to your librarians and to your local librarians so that it gets a paperback reissue because it really deserves as wide a readership as possible. There are many contemporary resonances in the book, which I think will come out through Hannah Rose's talk, but also through the Q&A at the end. There's some housekeeping before I hand over to our speaker this evening. This event is obviously taking place in the Zoom with us rather than the British Library, which means that whilst we aren't expecting any technical glitches, we obviously can't guarantee that these are not going to happen. So we would ask that you be patient should any gremlins occur on the line. Also, we very much encourage questions. Please, you can pop any questions that you may have for Hannah Rose and either the chat box or the Q&A box. And we're going to collate those and have about half an hour for discussion at the end of the talk, which is going to take place over the next 45 minutes or so. So without further ado is my real pleasure to hand over to Dr Hannah Rose Murray. Thank you so much, Phillip and Brett and Cara, the team at the Apple Centre and the library as a whole for hosting this event. And I'm really privileged to be here. My research actually focuses quite a bit on Victorian newspapers. So the 19th century newspaper collection at the British Library has been really instrumental to my work. And over the last few years, it's really been a joy visiting the library and uncovering so many fascinating stories about black activists, what happened during those lectures, and their impact on local communities. So thank you so much for this opportunity. So what I'm going to do today is actually share some stories from the book that Philip Kearney mentioned. And in doing so just take you on a mini virtual tour of central London through sort of three locations where African Americans spoke and will flip between some maps and also a PowerPoint so you can actually see some of the folks who I'll be talking about. I usually issue a trigger warning at the start of my talks, I'm going to be talking about racism, slavery, racial violence and white domestic terrorism so it's really important to sort of note that up front. And that's particularly relevant right now as we're obviously living through a pandemic which is disproportionately affecting people of colour around the world and and also as we watch the Black Lives Matter process still taking place around the world too. And the people that I'm going to be talking about today spent their lives protesting and campaigning for equality and in multiple ways declared that their Black Lives Matters are way back in the 19th century. And there are so many parallels between then and now one example is IW Wells Barnett's anti-lynching campaign, I'm going to be talking a little bit about her later. And these connections are really pressing when we consider the modern lynchings of black women and trans folks in the US as well. And of course in Britain we still see the legacies of slavery and racism in our own history of institutionalised racism, police brutality against people of colour and even the commemoration of slave trade is through monuments and obviously this year has sparked a lot of protests and intentions in places like Bristol I'm sure you've seen the removal of Edward Colton statue in Bristol for example that obviously took place a few months ago in June. So in several ways what I'm hoping to do in this talk is actually highlight not only the trajectory between activists in the 19th century and today but actually how far we still have to go to accomplish their anti-racist missions. Okay so here we go I'm just going to share my screen with you and show you a map from my website which is should be in the chat in a second. So my research recovers and amplifies African American testimony from the British Isles during 19th century with a particular focus on survivors of slavery from the southern states of the US. So for those folks based in the UK who might not know a lot about slavery in the US just sort of a very very brief overview. So slavery had existed in the Americas since the 16th century and become firmly entrenched by the American Revolution in terms of in the northern and southern states and civil war fought between 1861 and 1865 led to the legal abolition of slavery in 1865. So the main period I've been talking about is the 1840s and the 1850s and by that time 4 million women men and children were enslaved on plantations for example from Louisiana to Maryland, North Carolina. And it's important to note that from the very beginning African Americans resisted their oppression in numerous ways from actually physically running away to Canada to Britain, and I'll talk about that in a second obviously. So to the northern states of the US where slavery didn't exist in the 1840s and 1850s, but they also formed marooning communities in the swamps of Florida and Louisiana on the actual plantation itself they broke tools stole food, held secret meetings and fought back against their enslavers or so called slave breakers in various ways. Now, for those of him who actually managed to escape they formed the heart of the transatlantic anti slavery movement. Women and men wrote about their experiences in slave narratives and autobiographies they lectured on abolitionist platforms they wrote poetry, they composed paintings or illustrations to teach white Americans and also folks on this side of the Atlantic about the realities of slavery. And some of these activists these free and fighters made radical and politicized journeys across England, Ireland, Scotland and even parts of rural Wales during the 19th century to inform the public about slavery. Now just to kind of pause very quickly and give a little bit of context in terms of Britain because Britain heads sort of legally abolish the slave trade in 1987 and slavery by the end of the 1830s sort of across the British Empire. And what's interesting is that instead of sort of confronting the nation's own problems with colonialism and racism, British and Irish audiences were really fascinated with stories about American slavery and as a result, welcomed many black activists throughout the 19th century. And they lectured in large cities to small fishing villages, speaking in town halls and churches and chapels the private parlour rooms of their wealthy patrons if they were to have them school rooms and even open spaces. And what I try to do on my website which is www.felricdougasinbritain.com is essentially trying to map as many of their speaking locations as I can. And currently the map that hopefully you should be looking at. There are about 4,700 speeches on here so represented by about 26 African Americans. So this is a work in progress as I sort of daily discover more lectures but right now I've listed about 1550 locations across Britain and Ireland where they lectured. And what's fascinating is that you know if you can explore the map you can see that in the London area there's just under 500 there's far more lectures happening outside of London. And I can get into the reason why that might be the case in the Q&A if someone's interested or anyone's interested. But as we kind of zoom into the map there's sort of the numbers dissipate and you can sort of zoom in a little bit further and and find, for example, a man called J Hughes spoke in 1864. So there's a little bit of information if we know it about the venue the date, things like that and on the right hand side there's a key for certain individuals if you want to explore. But as I'm sure you'll notice just by immediately looking at the map African Americans were speaking in cities obviously like London, Liverpool, Manchester Leeds, but they were also sort of veering off to additional paths. Or what we would have seen would be traditional path of activism and heading all the way up to the Orkney Islands in Scotland. So they were speaking in Lamberis at the foot of Snowdonia in Keswick in the Lake District, Bakewell in the Peak Districts, Ventnor all the way down at the Eye of Whites, Colour Coats just off a tiny fishing village just outside of Newcastle, and all the way down to Penzance and also John O'Groats as well. And in doing so they traveled tens of thousands of miles, William Wells Brown estimates that he traveled about 25,000 miles in the early 1850s when he was lecturing in Britain. And obviously while this talk is going to mainly focus on London, as you can expect numerous lecturers spoken churches and chapels schoolhouses, music halls, taverns, parks, literary institutions, private clubs, friends meeting houses, hotels, and institutions like St James's Hall, the Hall of Commerce as well, Freemasons Hall, and sometimes theaters too. Most African Americans were travelling in the 1840s, sort of between the 1840s and the 1860s, until slavery was legally abolished in the US as I've already mentioned in 1865, but it's important also to note that many African Americans were coming after 1865, because obviously the legacies of slavery still persisted through racism, segregation and lynching, which obviously as I mentioned already we can still see with us today. But they were also speaking to all different types of audiences, working class, middle class, upper class, to the aristocracy, to newspaper editors, doc workers, sailors, merchants, and some meetings were specifically organised for working class groups and some as well were specifically organised for children too, sometimes in Sunday schools and sometimes in just purely open spaces. And British and Irish people came to listen to these speakers for a variety of reasons, for political reasons, because they may have been interested in the anti-savory cause, but also there's an element of racial curiosity there to sort of hear witnesses of slavery speak for themselves. So the other thing that you can explore on my website, if you'd like, is I've done a couple of different types of mapping tools. I'm not necessarily IT literate, but this map is a really cool way of sort of examining the sort of concentration of lectures within a particular area. So as you can see the sort of northern or area here Manchester Leeds. And again Newcastle has a really high concentration of lectures in this particular area. My screen and hopefully get a PowerPoint up for you. So just to kind of talk a little bit more about why African Americans were specifically coming to Britain and Ireland. So obviously they were coming to inform the transatlantic public about slavery. And you had folks like the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, who told stories about slavery's brutality he was lecturing in 1851 and 1852. And in Belfast in 1851 he's talking to this particular audience, and he says that the US nation was staggering under the future corpse of American slavery. Now Garnet's speeches were very popular. And this sort of idea and concept that African Americans and survivors of slavery were coming over to inform the public about those vitalities, sort of links into another reason why they were coming over here, which was to publish their written narratives which became a central part of the transatlantic transatlantic even anti-slavery movement. And, particularly on this side of the Atlantic, the literary and commercial success of these narratives sort of largely been forgotten but in numerous cases, particularly when we think about Frederick Douglass, Moses Roper and Josiah Henson, they're often outselling Victorian writers that we know today. So for example, Frederick Douglass sold 13,000 copies of his narrative in just under two years between 1845 and 1847. Moses Roper sold about 38,000 copies of his narrative, up to about 1848. And Josiah Henson sold a quarter of a million copies of his revised save narrative in 1876 in just under two years, just a phenomenal figure. And when we compare it to someone like Lewis Carroll, who writes Alice in Wonderland in 1865 in the first three years, that sold about 13,000 copies. And again, sort of fast forward a little bit to the end of the 1890s when Bram Stoker published Dracula, initial sales were only about 3,000 copies. So just the sheer number of these slave narratives that were sold to the British and Irish public are really staggering. Other reasons why African Americans were coming here, they're encouraging people to sign petitions, sign anti-slavery petitions to practice non-fellowship within slavers or slave holding churches who were based in the US. They were writing letters to the press in the hope that newspaper coverage will be reflected back to the US. And in doing all of that they were working with black British activists as well. They were also coming here to raise money to enact the legal purchase of themselves or family members because technically if someone escaped from slavery they were still in the eyes of the law and still enslaved. And they also came over to as part of that to raise money for specific anti-slavery societies or causes. Another reason was that certain African Americans actually came over to encourage boycotts of slave produced goods. So for example in 1854 you have James Watkins saying that if this particular audience could hear the groans of the slaves and witness for a moment their sufferings, you would never again touch Savannah Rice. You would feel like you're eating the blood and bones of the Negroes. So Watkins is essentially urging his audiences to be a bit more thoughtful and aware of the origins of the products that they regularly bought and consumed on a daily basis. This is at a time by the 1850s 90% of the cotton that was coming into Liverpool was slave grown and was from the US. Now in their lectures, black Americans were doing a variety of things, they were exhibiting instruments of torture, whips, chains, they were exhibiting paintings, they read their own poetry, they sang songs, they sometimes showed the scars on their bodies, they were lecturing to quite literally millions of people really pushing their bodies and voices to breaking point.  But the other thing as well is that black American activists were really unafraid of pointing out British racism and it's sort of colonialist past and present at that point. So that's the British nation's role in the slave trade, establishing slavery in the Americas and the West Indies and also the development of racist thoughts. So in 1854, you have the Reverend Samuel Ringgold Ward and he says to a York audience. I'm quoting now that since the Tudor Times British soil was reddened with the blood of my race. And he also pointed to the lackluster response of the British government who completely ignored the numerous cases of black British sailors who were docking in American ports like Charleston, and were kidnapped and sold into slavery. So what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to highlight the three areas of the three sites that I'm going to be talking about. So if we were in London and all together, it's sort of in a mini walking tour. The first place I'm going to talk about is Finsbury Chapel, which was located on East Street just here. And then we're going to head down to Bishop's Gate and then to the site of the Strand Palace Hotel, which is a site of Exeter Hall. This is what Finsbury looked like. This is a map from the late sort of the early 1890s and Finsbury Chapel stood on East Street, which is just about here. And I will show you a picture on my slides. This is what Finsbury Chapel would have looked like. And it was one of the biggest chapels in London. It was founded in the mid sort of 1820s and was associated with Alexander Fletcher, a congregation minister. And it's a really great place to start as there were several African Americans who spoke here. So the first person I want to sort of introduce you to is Moses Roper on the left here and he spoke in Finsbury Chapel in 1836. Now Roper was born in 1815 in North Carolina, torture and abuse at the hands of his enslavers after he tried to escape by his count between 16 and 20 times. Now he eventually managed to escape and came to Britain. He wrote a slave narrative, which was published in 1837 in Britain. And it's actually regarded as one of the first containing illustrations of slavery, including scenes of his own torture. Now within 10 years it sold 38,000 copies as I've already mentioned, but it also sold 5000 copies purely in the Welsh language as well. Now across Britain and Ireland, Roper's sort of performances and lectures were often an unrelenting and brutal tale of slavery, focusing on descriptions of torture he had personally experienced or witnessed. And he was really unafraid of challenging white fragility, and he refused to compromise over his barbaric accounts for lynching, which sometimes alienated or threatened the set of his message because obviously he was predominantly speaking to white audiences. And Roper's speech here at Finsbury Chapel marked the start of his lecturing career, and was one of two in London that sparks immediate controversy. So after Roper gives a speech at Finsbury Chapel, one minister objects to Roper's descriptions of slavery. And in particular to the lynchings of enslaved people that Roper was talking about in this particular meeting. And this minister essentially argued and wrote publicly that Roper was lying. Roper refused to accept this slander, and in particular the accusation that he was sort of exaggerating the brutalities of slavery and he wrote this public letter and recounted in excruciating detail the lynching of an enslaved man named George who was chained to a tree and was actually burned alive. And throughout his entire life Roper refused to accept any slander or libel directed towards his very painful and traumatic memories and he always defended himself and his sort of enslaved brethren so no matter what the cost. And this began a lifelong career of public and savory activism and was certainly not the only master of controversy he experienced you know he was bold he was uncompromising, as I mentioned and just to give you another example. He's lecturing up in Birmingham to mainly sort of a Methodist audiences there are a lot of Methodist ministers on the platform, and he's talking about how pretty much every religious population including Methodists owned enslaved people in the US, and the Methodist ministers take objection to this and they try to get him on the platform to apologize and recount what he said. And Roper stands up and everyone obviously thinks he's going to recount and apologize and all he says is, my mother was enslaved by a Methodist. And this particular meeting ends in complete uproar. And similarly, in another meeting Roper was actually advised by a minister to sort of curtail his violent descriptions of slavery, but Roper only says in reply, I shall tell the truth. So in lecture after lecture Roper relays horrific stories of violence of torture, infanticide mass suicide and murder and by doing so there are quite abolitionists try to slander his reputation again and ruin the success of his lecturing talk. And his experience of violence was so beyond their understanding so in their thinking along this white racist schema that they just assumed he was lying. And this paper correspondence for example just wrote about him with the most patrolling racist hatred that they accused him of essentially memorizing tortures that he had read about in books about the Spanish Inquisition Inquisition. But one of the most devastating slanders actually came from a former supporter of Ropers and a self professed abolitionist called Thomas Price.  And he sort of provided aid and assistance when Roper had decided to essentially train to become a missionary. Somewhere along the line Roper essentially decided to change his career plans as we are obviously all entitled to do, but price was absolutely incensed with this and he wanted his testimonial in Roper's narrative withdrawn because his own essentially question of support was based on the fact that Roper wanted to become a missionary and he actually wrote a public letter saying that Roper was a beggar and a liar he prayed on white philanthropy, all of this sort of racist narrative. And this was hugely hugely damaging to Roper's reputation and really restricted some of the places where he could lecture as a result. A few months after this letter was published Roper actually wrote a public letter and wrote of his anxiety and depression that he now had mounting debts to pay because some avenues of support were essentially close to him he was unable to sell copies of his narrative to earn a living. And he's full of anxiety he is terrified that he's going to be dragged into prison and obviously there's a lot of personal trauma there because he was arrested and imprisoned so many times after trying to escape slavery. But he wrote this letter essentially to defend his own reputation to sort of prove the sheer extent of his activism to reject all claims that he was a liar and actually most importantly to make sure prices letter was the direct cause of his his misfortunes. But the reason why I sort of told the story is that it's really important because it reveals just because you were a sort of self professed abolitionist it didn't mean that you were anti racist. And there are numerous examples of white abolitionists jeopardizing black abolitionist missions, particularly in Britain and Ireland, writing racist and patronizing descriptions of them and actually refusing to offer their support and sometimes when these racist were in quite dire circumstances. So the second person who spoke at Finsbury Chapel is Frederick Douglass he spoke here at twice in 1846 and again in 1847. And I'm sure most of you have heard of Frederick Douglass he's the most famous African American of the 19th century was a radical activist for abolition equality social justice feminism.  He was an incredible author, author, poets, journalists newspaper editor just to name a few, and his escape from slavery in 1838 with the integral help with his wife Anna Murray would signal a sort of dramatic turning point in the anti savory movement. I just want to dwell very quickly on Anna Murray as well because there would not be a Frederick Douglass without Anna Murray Douglas and I urge you to check out the work of Professor Celeste Marie Bernier who's working on some revolutionary research about Anna Murray Douglas at the moment. Actually, Douglas after he escapes slavery he travels around the eastern United States for a while lecturing and he publishes a slave narrative in early 1845 in the spring. And he travels to Britain in the summer of 1845 and he stays here for nearly two years. He's a revised edition of his slave narrative both Irish and English editions. And he works with abolitionists in London, Dublin, Edinburgh, and beyond. And he lectured over 300 times to audiences of all classes, genders faces and and creeds. And so, the Finsbury Chapel was really popular. And he even published this this speech as a as a separate pamphlet. And I just want to read you some extras, some extracts of this particular speech. So, he started by reiterating his mission to Britain why he came to Britain in the first place. I'm quoting now, he wanted the stakeholders of America to know that the curse in which conceals their crimes is being lifted abroad, that we are opening the dark cell and leading the people into the horrible recesses of what they are pleased to call their domestic institution. We want them to know that a knowledge of their whippings, their scougings, their brandings, their chainings is not confined to the plantations, but that some nigger of theirs has broken loose from his chains, has burst through the dark incrustation of slavery and is now exposing their deeds of deep damnation to the gaze of the Christian people of England. I expose slavery in this country because to expose it is to kill it. Slavery is one of those monsters of darkness to whom the light of truth is death. Expose slavery and it dies. Light is to slavery what the heat of the sun is to the root of a tree, it must die under it. To tear off the mask from this abominable system to expose it to the light of heaven I to the heat of the sun, that it may burn and wither it out of existence is my object in coming to Britain. I want the slave holder surrounded as by a wall of anti slavery fire, so that so that he may see the condemnation of himself and his system glaring down in letters of light. Now this Finnsbury chapel meeting and I nearly every speech he gave Douglas pointed to in his words this some unholy alliance between slavery and religion in the south in the southern states. He attacked in slavers who said they were Christians or who were religious ministers as the very brutalizing nature of slavery meant that religion and slavery. He would argue how could a Christian preach or go to church on a Sunday and then return to their plantation and whip or rape a woman and children. And he really tapped into debates in the British Isles that were going round at that time about where the British churches should renounce fellowship with their brethren in the US who supported slavery who took a blind eye to its policies. And I think similar to some of the black lives matter process and some of the process and placards we've seen, you know, Douglas was really getting into this sort of concept of silence was complicity silence was a type of violence in itself. And just to sort of extend this sort of analogy a little bit more he actually argued at Finnsbury. Sort of after another quote. Instead of preaching the gospel against this tyranny, rebuke and wrong of slavery, ministers of religion have sought by all in every means to throwing the background whatever in the Bible could be construed into a position to slavery and to bring forward that which they could torture in its support. And he basically goes on to say that because he loved the purity of Christianity, Douglas hated the slave holding the woman whipping the mind darkening the soul destroying religion that exists in the southern states of America. So I regard the one as good and pure and holy that I cannot but regard the other as bad, corrupt and wicked, loving the one I must hate the other holding to the one I must reject the other. Now using this really blistering testimony, the testimony Douglas exposed the actions of the Free Church of Scotland and he talks about this in in Finnsbury and other places in London to. The Free Church was formed in 1843 after the Thomas Chalmers and his supporters broke away from the established Church of Scotland, and to raise money for this new organization. Chalmers essentially sends several free church missionaries missionaries to the US to collect donations. They return with several thousand thousand pounds and abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic essentially find out that some of these donations came from in slavers. Now Douglas was traveling around Britain, he obviously discovered this he was incensed and he used his position as a fugitive from slavery to blast what he called the Free Church for its actions how could a church call itself free if it accepted this bloodstained money. And he settled on this slogan, send back the bloodstained money, and he spoke to thousands of Scottish people in towns like Edinburgh Glasgow per Aberdeen songs and poems were written about his campaign. Send back the money, or the slogan was painted in red paint on free church buildings at the pavements of Edinburgh in the streets of Edinburgh, free church buildings themselves and along with two white Quaker women Douglas actually climbs Arthur's seat, which is a small mountain in Edinburgh if you know Edinburgh and carved send back the money into the hillside. There are no other white abolitionists could describe the realities of slavery like Douglas and he accused the free church ministers of accepting this bloodstained money that ought to have gone to his education which was obviously denied to him under slavery, and even created a sort of fictional scenario for his audiences where he imagined himself was being sold by his enslave with the profits going into the free church treasury. Well, unfortunately the money was actually never returned but as Douglas later said, he gave him the opportunity to sort of make British and Scottish audiences in particular aware of the reach of American slavery. I'm going to also briefly highlight two other men who spoke at Finnsbury Chapel so William Henry Jackson spoke here in December 1862, and also John Salamat and who used to see on the right hand side here he lectured here in May 1863, both of whom urging their audiences to support the American Civil War. And I'm sure most of you are aware the American Civil War fought between the Union, largely the northern states, and the southern states where slavery existed the Confederacy. It was fought between 1861 and 1865 and it had huge consequences for the British Isles. It's a really brilliant book by Richard Blackett, if you want to learn more about this history. So Britain actually became perilously close to recognising the Confederacy in part for two reasons. There were some aristocrats and influential politicians who admired the South schools for establishing a new republic. But mainly it was of economic Britain relied as I've mentioned so much on the importation of cotton sugar tobacco. It will be a real problem for the economy of Britain. In the onset of war, there was a blockade so the imports of cotton in particular dried up this meant that thousands of British working men and women, particularly in Lancashire and Cheshire and Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire actually became unemployed they languished in poverty because of the war. But African Americans like John Salamat and urged their audiences not to support the Confederacy as it was synonymous with with slavery and white supremacy. So between 1862 and 1863, William Henry Jackson toward Britain and lectured about his escape from his enslave who happened to be Jefferson Davis who was the president of the Confederacy. And he sort of even publicly humiliated a Confederate official in London shortly after he gives this Finsbury Chapel speech. So he got to him one evening after a lecture introduces himself as a former coachman of Davis and sort of walks outside with this official and the official is met with a small group of abolitionists who are holding all these anti slavery images of slavery's brutality there. And he calls quite a lot of laughter at these meetings because he retells the story that Davis had apparently written to him saying that demanding that he return back to his enslavement by particular dates and Jackson said why I thought I would be polite and write back and say that I'm in London at date so can't make it. As you can imagine that caused quite a lot of laughter in the audience. And Jackson to also spoke out against the Confederacy and actually served as a minister in London for a short period of time while he was here as well. And he declared here at Finsbury in other places that he hoped Confederate sympathizers in Britain. So Martin had not yet been so successful as to blow sugar into their eyes or cotton into their ears, and thus prevent them from seeing the horrors of slavery and hearing the groans of the poor oppressed slaves. So Martin is obviously using the cotton and the sugar there, you know, so thinking about boycotting slave produced goods.  And he argued that the war was simply between freedom and slavery was a question of civilization and humanity he said. But much the relief of these African Americans Britain actually didn't formally recognize Confederacy but their lectures went a long way. about the real reasons for the cause of the war. So we're going to move to our second location so showing you these brilliant maps, we're going to go to Crosby Hall, which is here this is in Bishop's gate. And the original sort of sites here there's been a hall was built sort of since the mid 1400s but actually now Crosby Hall is essentially moved to Chelsea in 1910 the whole building was moved. So I'll just show you a couple of pictures of what it would have looked like this is here on the left and an interior when it was turning to a fancy looking restaurant in the 1890s. This is Crosby Hall, and I just want to tell you the story of dessert Henson who spoke in Crosby Hall in 1851. He was born enslaved in Maryland in 1789. And Henson was an orator community activist author preacher soldier, he was the only person of color to exhibit at the great exhibition in London in 1851. But Henson is most famously known for his association with the character of Uncle Tom in how it features those famous anti slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. So it's a sort of transatlantic phenomenon this novel that sold a million copies of Britain, sorry million copies in Britain, I should say, alone. And just with just after a year, I should say, and Henson was really fascinating because he essentially encouraged this association that Stowe had based the character of Tom on his life story. And Henson revised the slave narrative and used base to actually describe the reality of slavery because Stowe was a white American woman had no idea about the reality of slavery whereas Henson as a formerly. enslaved person obviously could could talk about those details. The really interesting thing about thing about Henson is that two decades after Uncle Tom's Cabin is published. Henson actually travels once again to Britain in 1876, and he needed money to essentially settle his mortgage most of his work in finances have been tied up to helping other fugitives escape to Canada. When he now lives. And when he reached London he worked with a reformer and journalist called John Love. He was based in London and love was essentially fascinated with Henson story and he marketed Henson as the Uncle Tom. And this was a really huge success because even 20 years after the novel was published Uncle Tom's Cabin was just a just a still phenomenal success there was some Uncle Tom's Cabin productions and dramas going on all the way through London and throughout the country. And Henson's sort of lecturing tour was a real success in six months he spoke to half a million people, which is impressive as a whole but more impressive when you learn he was 88 at this point. He was invited to meet Queen Victoria in March 1877. In 1877, at Winter Palace you can see a picture here on the right, and even had a model of himself constructed in Manintou Swords. And as I've already mentioned, his slave narrative or revised edition of that narrative sold a phenomenal quarter of a million copies. And the relationship with this sort of fictional character of Uncle Tom was incredibly complex and even actually became quite tiresome. So this association brought him fame but he, when we look at some of his speeches he also outrightly rejected it. So he gives a speech in Dundee in March 1877 he's introduced as the Uncle Tom, he stands on stage. And the first thing he says is my name is not Tom my name is not Uncle Tom. I don't have any other name printed in newspapers other than my own my name is Desiree Henson. And unfortunately for him the coverage the next day of this particular speech was Uncle Tom in Dundee. But it really gets to the heart of this difficult association in relationship that Henson has with this fictional character, particularly by the 1870s I've already mentioned that there are a lot of dramas and productions of Uncle Tom's cabin going on. A lot of these productions are grounded in racist minstrel stereotypes of the character of Tom, you know, the sort of exaggerated and grotesque characteristics or sort of the racialized features were on display in these productions. And perhaps Henson didn't necessarily want to be associated with Uncle Tom all the time when he was getting tired of it. There was another African American who spoke at Crosby Hall as well and his name was William Craft he spoke there in 1855, but he also spoke in another location which I'll just take you to now which will be the final location. So we have here Exeter Hall, so obviously you've got the Lighting Theatre here and Somerset House and this is the Strand for those of you who know London, and Exeter Hall was a very famous venue in sort of 19th century society. The first opens in 1831, unfortunately destroyed in 1907. And as you can see it covers quite a space there was a one auditorium could hold up to sort of four and a half thousand people. And I just show you a really beautiful illustration of what a meeting would have looked like potentially in Exeter Hall so on the left this is an illustration of an anti-corner meeting that was held in 1846 which is actually the same year that Frederick Douglass spoke at Exeter Hall. On the side you have an image here of the exterior. So, because of its fame as an anti-slavery meeting venue there are several black Americans who spoke here. So Nathaniel Paul as early as 1833, Charles Lennox Ramon in 1840, I've mentioned Douglass in 1846, Reverend Henry Island Garner in 1851, John Brown and Samuel Ringgold Ward both in 1853, and John Anderson in 1861. So quite a few people, but I just want to tell the story of William and Ellen Crafts because William spoke here in the early 1850s. Now both were enslaved in Georgia. They, their escape attempts is documented in their slave narrative called Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom. It was published in London in 1860. You can also read it. And it's also, you can read it online for free documenting the American South, which is a really great website that houses all of these slave narratives. Essentially, both William and Ellen resolved to escape over sort of the Christmas period of 1848, and Ellen's complexion at the time was described as quite fair. This image of Ellen dressed in sort of her mother's rape by her enslaver, but she, but that meant that she could cross the boundaries of race of gender of class and even physical ability to dress as a southern white man. And William would pose as her enslaved servant essentially and then would both escape slavery. This image here on the left is Ellen dressed in sort of gentlemen's clothing it's actually flipped this white mark you see here or line is actually a bandage covering her right arm, literacy and learning to read and write was punishable by death for the enslaved population. Obviously, Ellen could not read or write so she essentially posed as a disabled white man so that she wouldn't have to sign her name when they were catching a train or a steamboat. And obviously it's was an obvious point that this is a really huge risk as a massive testament to Ellen's bravery in particular that they managed to pull this escape attempt off. Everything rested on her performance as a white southern man traveling outside of the county the state into unknown territory that she's never been to before. And if they failed they would have been subjected to torture abuse and would have been forcibly separated and sold to another plantation. And as it's documented in their narrative. And as was the custom the Jim Crow custom obviously white people were in a different carriage than people of African descent. So Ellen was in this carriage completely by herself. At one point she recognizes a white man coming into the carriage as a friend of her former enslaver so she's absolutely terrified that she's going to get recognized. And they managed to make it to Boston. Essentially there are some slave catchers who are lying in wait to try and drag them back down into slavery so they flee to Britain. And they remain here for nearly 20 years they raised five children and freedom here. They traveled around the country to denounce slavery and later the Confederate cause during the American Civil War. And as a particular turned her home into a hub of black activism she invited fellow lectures to stay there she supported numerous reform causes like temperance and suffrage, as well as anti slavery of course. She went to private parties and challenge racist thinkers and when she heard rumors that were going around the US press, saying that she wanted to go back into slavery. In a little letter that was printed on both sides the Atlantic where she said boldly I would rather starve a free woman than be a slave for the best man that ever breathed upon the American continent. So Ellen's stories or causes us to reflect on the other black women of the transatlantic and slavery movement. So the first of the people I discussed in in the book as well are actually a man and that's because of Victorian racial and gender dynamics it was far more difficult for women let alone black women to speak on a public stage when their sort of role was supposed to be in a private domestic sphere rather than speaking to audiences on political matters but they were integral to the movement. Sarah Parker remand here in the middle she had great success at lecturing in England and Scotland in the late 1850s and early 1860s. She revived anti slavery societies she spoke alongside Frederick Douglass twice. And when he returned to Britain in 1859. And she actually lived out the rest of her days in Italy she trained as a nurse and live there she did not return to the US. We also have folks that like Jane Brown here you can see her with her activist husband Benjamin William Brown and her children, because I think the other thing as well when we talk about black women in the anti slavery movement is that it's often a question of erasure and if it invisibilization where we aren't able to necessarily understand or know a lot about their movements or about their testimony. And Jane Brown as an example of that we don't know whether she gave lectures in her own right alongside her husband it's really difficult to try and sort of discern that. And another example is Julia Jackson she was the activist wife of John Andrew Jackson, you know they both traveled around British Isles, and she actually gave lectures in her own rights but the newspaper correspondents who were obviously you know more often than not white men gave extensive extensive coverage to her husband's lectures but would say things like Mrs Jackson stood up and gave a short speech and that's all we know. So it's sort of difficult trying to extract her voice as well. But the last person I want to talk to you about today is Ida B Wells Barnett because she also spoke at Exeter Hall in 1894. And she's being discussed a lot in the press right now, not only because of the continuosities between the lynching of the 19th century and 20th century that she fought so ferociously against, and obviously the lynching we still see today. But in May 2020, so this year she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her journalism or better, better late than never. But Wells Barnett was a leading activist against lynching. She was also one of the co founding members of the NAACP, one of America's oldest civil rights organizations. Historians estimate that between the 1880s and the 1960s, more than 4,400 African Americans were lynched so murdered without trial across the US, although of course the real figure is likely to be a lot higher than that. And these lynchings were public acts of torture where black women, men and children were burned, they were stabbed with hot pokers, they were shot, mutilated and hanged photographs of their bodies were taken and occasionally white children were given to go to school to watch. Wells Barnett's campaign against lynching began after a friend of hers was lynched in Memphis and she was outraged, she penned an editorial in her newspaper, sort of denouncing the sort of white supremacist mob. And she was actually chased out of Memphis on pain of death because she'd written this piece, but she vowed to record as much information about lynching as possible and publish it and as she sort of famously said, the way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them. Wells Barnett visited Britain in 1893 and 1894 to raise support for the anti lynching campaign. And in 1894 in particular she has a really successful tour she works with newspaper editors, aristocrats, merchants, religious ministers, reformers and even black students from the University of London to hold numerous meetings against lynching. And she collects all of the articles that were written about her talks, and she essentially sends them to the governors of southern states even to the president. A lot of these governors were actually disgusted that in their words an African American woman was spreading lies about the US to Britain. And they would often print obviously very racist descriptions of her. And what she would do is that in these meetings in Britain she would read out these articles sort of expose their racism and she would say, out of their own mouths will the murderers be condemned.  Instead, Wells argued that lynching was solely used to suppress the black population and often white women actually voluntarily entered into relationships with black men when they were caught by the local community they cried rape which led to the lynching of black men. In 1894, Wells Barnett spoke over 35 times in London and her activism led to sort of the establishment of an anti lynching committee which was supported by influential aristocrats newspaper editors. And throughout her tours, she was unafraid of challenging white supremacy. She exposed the actions of white feminists as well who tried to ruin the success of her mission I can go into that a little bit in the Q&A if people are interested. And she also attacked British racism to she wrote an article entitled Liverpool slave traditions and present practices. And she actually criticizes the city's role in the slave trade the legacy of slavery and she really targets Britain's of deliberately constructed historical amnesia around slavery and reminded audiences that merchants and even ordinary citizens in the people and beyond relied on slave growing cotton and these cities were built on the profits of the slave trade. Now, as I sort of draw my talk to a close, I hope my talk is highlighted how for those of us who live in Britain Islands we, you know, walking past sites that are rich in black activism on a daily basis and not just in London too. And we can't forget their their actions their testimony, or the knowledge that in organizing these really exhausting lecturing tours they were accounting their their trauma night after night for sometimes hours on end you know reliving brutal memories of torture and eradicate largely white audiences about the realities of slavery and its legacies. So what once were taverns churches that Tam halls may now be sort of hotels car parks or offices but they remain monuments to the inspiring terrorism and relentless activism of these freedom fighters, particularly right now I think we should all share in their hope to that we will one day live in a more equal and just world. So thank you for listening. Well, thank you so much for that Hannah Rose. If we were in a theater, we would obviously be on behalf of the over 200 people who have tuned in points during that talk. I think I clap on behalf of everyone. So we have about 25 minutes for questions and we've had dozens of questions come in over the course of your talk so I apologize in advance for people who've taken the time to to field to post questions in the chat or the Q&A. There's no way we're going to get through all of them but I'm going to try to bunch as many together as possible so we can so we can answer people's enthusiasm and interest in your topic as much as we can. So let's start with a question which picks up on the contemporary resonances that you were speaking about at the end and this is very, very fascinating very important and I think quite a complex question to start you up with. This is from Joseph Levermore who I think is picking up on what you said about how abolitionists were not necessarily anti-racists and he asks what were the philosophical or intellectual grounds for being an abolitionist and yet racist. And is there anything that we can learn from such a pathology to combat current racism? That's a brilliant question to start with. I think what I will say to start with is that the abolitionist movement was really fractured and was really divided. There are a lot of tensions between some abolitionists who their philosophy was very much one of gradual abolition. So they believe that slavery should be abolished in maybe five, eight years time so there was a kind of plan to prepare and put that in action. Whereas you had other abolitionists so you have someone like William Lloyd Garrison who was a white abolitionist based in Massachusetts. He was sort of seen as very radical at the time because he believed in immediate abolition so slavery had to end now today this very minute because obviously all the brutalities that were going on. So that's just sort of a very general overview of some of the kind of strands of abolition. I think because we're talking about two societies and obviously I'm talking about Britain in the US specifically, we're talking about two societies that are essentially built on slavery and racism and white supremacy.  So just to give you a couple of examples, when Frederick Douglass travels around Britain between 1845 and 1847, he has to deal with essentially what I suppose we would call today is sort of microaggressions of people sort of being difficult towards him. He, you know, from kind of what we might see as sort of slightly minor things to other situations where you have the Irish abolitionist Richard D Webb who describes Douglass in a letter as a savage and a wild animal. You know, so that kind of horrific racialized imagery there. And also other elements where sort of there were white abolitionists sometimes thought that black abolitionists couldn't control money in terms of like the funding parts or anything that Douglass raised it couldn't necessarily go through him. And so I think it was that it wasn't necessarily a respectable career to be a lecturer. And just to again tell the story of with Frederick Douglass. There was another white abolitionist called Mary Maria Weston Chapman who was friends with William Lloyd Garrison. He essentially writes a series of letters to Richard D Webb, this person I mentioned earlier, and says that she's actually really worried that Douglas is going to desert the abolitionist cause and go to a different abolitionist society that they were sort of hostile with, because Douglas had chosen to speak at this other abolitionist society. I think it's strange to do a huge back and forth because when Douglas found out about this he said, I am literally going to speak at any anti savory meeting I'm invited or anything, you know, or anywhere I would like to go to because you do not control me. And just to sort of bring it back to the question as well. I think the end of that question was sort of what can we learn from from today. And I think actually there's a lot that particularly white allies can learn about the actions of white abolitionists in the 19th century were very much trying to control black abolitionist speakers in some way so they essentially wanted a black abolitionist to speak to sort of stand up speak, talk about the vitalities of slavery and sit back down again. And famously, someone said to someone said this to Frederick Douglass and he basically replied and said, you know I didn't feel just like talking about those wrongs I felt like denouncing them he wanted to create his own philosophy. I think that that's something that we can learn from today is why allies give people of color the space to talk about their own testimony their own experiences of racism to listen to be quiet and to actually provide that space and and be allies with hearts and minds open. Thank you guys I was particularly struck by what you said about the preparedness of African American abolitionists just kind of turn the mirror back on Britain's own histories of enslavement and racism and that it wasn't necessarily a kind of comfortable discourse about horrors that were happening over there and I'm sure that didn't play particularly well with a lot of audiences. So a couple of questions about the mobility of the African American activists that you've spoken about I think you know one of the things that strikes people who are new to the subject is the very fact of this mobility, both kind of making it all the way across the Atlantic but within the United Kingdom but also kind of further afield so I'm just going to throw two questions at you on this theme. And then Bill Port who asks, how did the escaped African American slaves get to Britain in the first place. And second, Amanda Delisle wants to know, did they go elsewhere in Europe on these speaking tours once they were here. Yeah, two brilliant questions thank you for that. And depending on the networks of support that African Americans had. So, for those of you based in the US and actually getting over to Britain sometimes they had their passage paid by sort of friendly white abolitionists who are based in the US. So I mentioned William and Alan crafts. Obviously, their escape to Britain was pretty immediate because obviously slave catchers were quite literally coming to Boston to try and drag them back down to slavery. Abolitionists raised that money. And also in the case of Frederick Douglass and Moses Roper to there were sort of essentially friendly folks who could help them out, sometimes with others. If they sort of announced that they were going to do a tour. If they were lecturing sort of early, it's all on the Eastern coast of the US. They would collect donations from the end of meetings to sort of to meet that cost of the of the steamship. And sometimes when he had someone like IW Wells Barnett, who was traveling sometimes some of her travel was actually sponsored and paid for societies on this side of the Atlantic and the Atlantic as well. And sorry, I've forgotten the second question. What was it. Sorry, Philip. I don't know whether the activists traveled elsewhere in Europe. Oh, sorry. Yes, thank you. Yes, so sometimes they did. So on my map, it looks a little bit odd because there's only three, three, three locations but James Watkins actually went to Paris and yeah, and I can't remember the third place, which I've mapped on there. And sometimes they traveled to Italy and France as well, not necessarily to sustain lecturing tours because the thing about coming to Britain Island is that there's a shared language there and also in a way shared culture. So there was a kind of element of of ease of talking to British and Irish audiences. But France is an interesting one. I just mentioned James Watkins, but William Wells Brown travels to Paris a couple of times. The first time is in 1849 he attends the Peace Congress that's held there. He goes with several abolitionists. He meets Victor Hugo and sort of other sort of French people of note. And he tells this really great story in his sort of travel narrative, which I urge everyone to read that's available on documenting the American South. And he talks about how he notices some pro-slavery Americans who are at this Peace Congress, who traveled over with him in the the same ship and they were incredibly racist towards him. And obviously didn't give him the time of day and then when William Wells Brown is being introduced to all of these sort of high figures of note and people like Victor Hugo.  So, yes, they did travel to other parts of Europe, but not necessarily with sustained towards the balance of the question. Great. Thank you. We've had quite a few questions come in that are asking, asking you to elaborate or speculate on the really difficult question of reception and audience response and the extent to which one can reconstruct that and whether one can know whether the speeches or various kind of intervention activist interventions that were being made were received enthusiastically or not. So, again, I'm going to try to bunch a couple of these together so Charles Jones asks, was there competition between British families to host these American visitors. Is there a kind of real enthusiasm on the ground to to receive these visitors. Rachel Hill asks, were the audiences for the talks exclusively white. And there are two questions which I think are kind of insinuating a question around how effective these were in terms of actually mobilizing anti racist feeling, one of which is from Khadija Rashid who asks, were any of these places that racist talks where they ever attacked, or the subject of physical verbal verification. And Isabel Wilson has asked, how far have you found the activists were received merely as spectacle in the UK. So, quite a lot of huge getting up with this. So I just want to reiterate we are having dozens and dozens of questions come in and it was fantastic and I'm sure we will relay all of these to Hannah Rose to look at offline as well. Yeah please do if your question doesn't get answered then feel free to contact me directly I'm more than happy to chat to folks. Yeah, thank you for all of the questions that people have sent in and particularly all of those ones that you've just read out Philip so. I think the first thing about reception and audience audience response is that it's very difficult to try and piece some of these responses together because a lot of the sources that I'm looking at are essentially sort of newspaper coverage of these particular meetings sometimes if it wasn't mentioned or alluded to then we might not know about whether this particular meeting was successful or not. So just to tell a couple of stories to sort of speak to hopefully all of those questions. Frederick Douglass as an easy one to start with because he was an absolute sensation in Britain Island, and it's a really wonderful anecdotes from the British press, because British and Irish newspaper correspondence just wax lyrical about his amazing performances and things like that and his amazing performances. He speaks in culture star in March 1847.  Hundreds of people are quite literally turned away and sort of for a few enterprising and folk they actually go around the side of the church and sort of crane their necks to listen to an open window and sort of such as a desire to hear him speak.  You have other meetings that sort of did end in in uproar I mentioned earlier about Moses Roper. Some of Douglas's meetings did go the wrong way should we say, because there were several people in the audience who objected to what he was saying about religion obviously I touched on that in my talk and Douglas was a deeply religious man but sometimes audiences were, I think, quite offended by what he was saying about Christianity in the south and they weren't necessarily able to distinguish and understand what Douglas was saying between the different types of Christianity Christianity. So sometimes that led to a lot of, you know, sort of uproarous behavior and we have to think that these talks and a bit like the theater, there are comparisons to the theater. You know, if a speaker was doing very well they'd be standing a feet clapping cheering people standing up and obviously if the meeting wasn't going to go so well then there would be people shouting at the podium confusion manic confusion things like that. And just to tell us sort of first during the base of that there were other figures who are not necessarily well known a man called William Watson gave a lecture against the Confederacy during the Civil War up. I think it's sort of around definitely in the midlands I can't quite remember where but basically he walks into this meeting and there are several pro confederate guys there and they essentially stand in front of him as he's trying to give his talk and they shout repeatedly and interrupt him throughout his talk three cheers for President Jefferson Davis, you know three cheers for the Confederacy, and their attempts to essentially push him you know they it doesn't necessarily result in an argument or in a massive fight, but there's a lot of kind of backlash backlash there. I think the other thing I'd say as well is that it's really difficult to talk about impacts because I found some really lovely anecdotes as well in the sources in the British press of of how people are affected by these by these speakers so Henry Highland Garner is giving a lecture. And he's obviously talking about the brutalities of slavery and this person actually stands up after the end of his tour, his talk, and he says I'm a sailor I have smoked tobacco for 40 years and I've never sort of understood how tobacco is linked to the slavery and to slave sorry to slavery in the south, I will never ever touch tobacco again. And obviously, there's no way to prove whether he did or not, but I think the fact that he's obviously making this public declaration, you know, is is really, really significant. You know you have, particularly after Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown's seeking tours you have people sort of donating to what were anti-sabery bazaars that was sort of held in the US which are essentially big fairs that people would come and buy lots of goods and the money and the slavery movement. And whenever a speaker came around the donations to these bazaars obviously increased because people were sort of really touched and influenced by not only a speaker's sort of the speakers lecture but also reading the narrative as well of these of these particular stories. So I hope that kind of answers the question about sort of trying to mobilize anti-sabery feeling and you know because that's a really great question too and I mentioned about Sarah Parker Remind who was trying to, well she actually revived anti-sabery societies that were kind of dwindling or had become extinct and her lecturing tour had a direct impact on those societies. Frederick Douglass creates a new anti-sabery society doesn't last long but obviously when he's here it's very successful and I'd be well as Barnett creates an anti-mention committee too. Just to also touch briefly on this idea of spectacle I think that definitely comes into it. We can't escape the fact that adverts for some of these lecturers were placed next to adverts of minstrel shows and also sort of other racialized dramas and Frederick Douglass commented on that endlessly too in his speeches. There was an element of spectacle for sure and there will be there were sort of several newspaper correspondents who are pretty clear in their racism you know they say oh I went to this lecture expecting you know some kind of something that I'd seen a minstrel show and actually I was blown away by the eloquence of this particular lecturer and again just to kind of touch on that because the sort of terms of eloquence and sort of surprise at how articulate these survivors were as obviously grounded in racial stereotypes as well and actually we're seeing that today you look at some of the conversation around Marcus Rashford and his brilliant campaigning and there's also sort of comments about his eloquence and his you know he's very articulate and that's completely grounded back in 18th and 19th century sort of descriptions. Lastly there was a question about sort of competition between families and networks. That's a really great question because I think with some of these activists there were networks were really important to the success of these these tours. So again Frederick Douglass when he comes in 1845 you know he has this whole network of abolitionists that he can stay with who stays with the web family in Dublin the Jennings family in Cork, the Esalen family in Bristol, you know with William Smale and in Glasgow and usually these abolitionists I've just mentioned because they were aligned within the same abolitionist group so with Harrison they tended to work together and John Esalen who was in Bristol he was really good at sort of organising and recommending what Douglas should do in Bristol to a certain extent so he basically says to Douglas right you can come and stay with me for a week and I know at this person this person this person I know this newspaper correspondent so he can write a favourable coverage of your book which I'm going to print because I got the money 3000 handbills to distribute and get people to come to your lecture, but I don't know this particular circle of people. So you should go and stay with my Quaker friend because he's going to introduce you to a different circle, and then those folks are going to introduce you to different circles so it was all about sort of maximising sort of interest in the anti-savory cause. But the last thing I will mention just on that point is that there was competition in the sense that because some abolitionists didn't always agree with each other there was a lot of petty squabbling if I'm being frank. So the Esslin family again in Bristol when Henry Highland Garnet, Josiah Henson and Samuel Ringgold Ward are doing talks and tours in the early 1850s they write really sort of in letters sort of between each other they're saying like there's this direct quote you know we're in a perpetual state of warfare against the Richardson family in Newcastle because all of you know Garnet and Ward and Henson are being supported by other abolitionists the Richardson family included. And one of the Esslin family is so convinced that someone from the Richardson group or family has actually come to spy on their anti-savory meetings. And you know they're just obsessed with sort of trying to ruin each other's reputation and obviously you know for a lot of these black Americans the overall goal was we need to focus on American slavery and that's kind of part of I think going back to the first question about these the tensions and also the sometimes how ridiculous allies or supposed allies could be. So I think I will stop there because I think I've tried to answer everything that you've covered. And I think that we're going to have to stop there for the evening I'm afraid I mean we could go on all night. We've had over 50 comments and questions and it has been the response has been absolutely terrific. And we really really captured a theme which obviously has very very strong resonances about Britain's own thinking through its experiences of race and racism connecting very powerfully with what's going on in the USA and that obviously speaks to our current moment which I think accounts for the real engagement that we've had here we'll have to get you back into the library at some point when this is all over. But just to just to reaffirm we asked your librarian to buy it is quite expensive in hardback but ask your librarian to buy it you can also consult it at which library once. In fact no we are reopening our reading rooms as of Tuesday so if you have a reader's ticket and are able to book a reader's desk you can come and visit us there. But for now I would urge you all to, from the comfort of your own homes, give another round of applause to Anna Rose Murray. And I would also like to thank you all very very very much for taking the time to join us. Thank you. Thank you.


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