Lest We Forget

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Lest We Forget Remembering the forgotten heroines
and heroes of the slave trade abolition
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Lest we forget Heroes and Heroines. Please
take a moment to read about them
Olaudah Equiano (c.1745 31 March 1797), also
known as Gustavus Vassa, was an eighteenth
century merchant seaman and writer of African
descent who lived in Britain's American colonies
and in Britain. He was a leading influence in the
abolition of slavery.
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Lest we forget Heroes and Heroines. Please
take a moment to read about them
Samuel 'Sam' Sharpe, National Hero of Jamaica was
born in 1801 in Jamaica. He was also known as
'Daddy' Sharpe. He was a slave throughout his
life, though he had been allowed to become a
well-educated man. Because of his education he
was highly respected by other slaves and he
became a well known preacher and leader. Sharpe
was a Deacon at the Burchell Baptist Church in
Montego Bay. He spent most of his time travelling
to different estates in St. James area educating
the slaves about Christianity and freedom. In the
mistaken belief that emancipation had already
been granted by the British Parliament, Sharpe
organised a peaceful strike across many estates
in western Jamaica at a critical time for the
plantation owners harvest of the sugar cane.
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Lest we forget Heroes and Heroines. Please
take a moment to read about them
Samuel 'Sam' Sharpe contd The Christmas
Rebellion (Baptist War) began on December 25,
1831 at the Kensington Estate. Reprisals by the
plantation owners led to the rebels burning the
crops, but the slaves did not attack the white
population. The rebellion was put down by the
Jamaican militia within two weeks and many of the
ringleaders, including Sharpe, were hanged in
1832. The rebellion caused two detailed
Parliamentary Inquiries which contributed to the
1833 Abolition of Slavery across the British
Empire. In 1975, the government of independent
Jamaica proclaimed Sharpe a National Hero with
the title Rt. Excellent Samuel Sharpe.
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Lest we forget Heroes and Heroines. Please
take a moment to read about them
Harriet Tubman (c. 1822March 10, 1913), also
known as "Moses of Her People," was an
African-American abolitionist. An escaped slave,
she made approximately 20 voyages to rescue about
300 enslaved friends and family to freedom in
Canada. During her lifetime she worked as a
lumberjack, laundress, nurse, and cook. As an
abolitionist, she acted as intelligence gatherer,
refugee organizer, raid leader, nurse, and
fundraiser.
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Lest we forget Heroes and Heroines. Please
take a moment to read about them
Mary Prince, the daughter of slaves, was born at
Brackish Pond, Bermuda, in about 1788. Her father
was a sawyer and her mother a house-servant. Mary
and her parents were the property of Charles
Myners. When Myners died Mary and her mother
were sold to Captain Williams. Mary now became
the personal slave of his daughter, Betsey
Williams. When she was twelve years old Mary was
hired out to another plantation five miles away.
Soon afterwards Williams sold her to another
family. Mary Prince worked as a domestic slave
and in the fields and during this period she was
constantly flogged by her mistress. She later
wrote "To strip me naked - to hang me up by the
wrists and lay my flesh open with the cow-skin,
was an ordinary punishment for even a slight
offence."
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Lest we forget Heroes and Heroines. Please
take a moment to read about them
Mary Prince contd Her master later sold her to
another man and in 1806 Mary Prince was sent to
work on the salt pans of Turk Island. In 1818
Mary Prince was then sold to John Wood, a
plantation owner who lived in Antigua, for 300.
She later wrote My work there was to attend the
chambers and nurse the child, and to go down to
the pond and wash clothes. But I soon fell ill of
the rheumatism, and grew so very lame that I was
forced to walk with a stick. She began
attending meetings held at the Moravian Church
where she learnt to read. While in Antigua she
met the widower, Daniel Jones, a former black
slave who had managed to purchase his freedom.
Jones asked Mary to marry him. They were married
in the Moravian Chapel in December 1826. John
Wood was furious when he found out and once again
she had to endure a severe beating with a
horsewhip.
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Lest we forget Heroes and Heroines. Please
take a moment to read about them
Mary Prince contdWood and his wife took her as
their servant to London. Soon after arriving in
England in 1828 she ran away and went to live at
the Moravian Mission House in Hatton Gardens. A
few weeks later she went to work for Thomas
Pringle, a member of the Anti-Slavery Society. In
1831 Pringle arranged for her to publish her
book, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian
Slave. The History of Mary Prince (1831) was the
first life of a black woman to be published in
Britain. This extraordinary testament of
ill-treatment and survival was a protest and a
rallying-cry for emancipation that provoked two
libel actions and ran into three editions in the
year of its publication.
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Lest we forget Heroes and Heroines. Please
take a moment to read about them
Mary Prince contdAfter publication of the book
John Wood sued the publishers claiming that Mary
Prince work had "endeavoured to injure the
character of my family by the most vile and
infamous falsehoods". Wood lost his case. Two
prominent supporters of slavery in Britain, James
MacQueen and James Curtin, took up Wood's case
and in an article in Blackwood's Magazine,
claimed that Prince's book contained a large
number of lies. Prince and her publisher sued
MacQueen and Curtin for libel and won their case.
It is thought that Prince remained in England
after 1833, perhaps continuing to work as a
servant. Her History is an important contribution
to early black writing, and it offers a glimpse
into the lives of enslaved men and women whose
life stories cannot be traced.
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Lest we forget Heroes and Heroines. Please
take a moment to read about them
Toussaint L'Ouverture, François Dominique
c.17441803, Haitian patriot and martyr. A
self-educated slave freed shortly before the
uprising in 1791, he joined the black rebellion
to liberate the slaves and became its
organizational genius. Rapidly rising in power,
Toussaint joined forces, briefly, in 1793 with
the Spanish of Santo Domingo and in a series of
fast-moving campaigns became known as L'Ouverture
the opening, a name he adopted. Although he
professed allegiance to France, first to the
republic and then to Napoleon, he was
singleheartedly devoted to the cause of his own
people and advocated it in his talks with French
commissioners. Late in 1793 the British occupied
all of Haiti's coastal cities and allied
themselves with the Spanish in the eastern part
of the island.
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Lest we forget Heroes and Heroines. Please
take a moment to read about them
Toussaint L'Ouverture contd He was the
acknowledged leader against them and, with the
generals Dessalines and Christophe, recaptured
(1798) several towns from the British and secured
their complete withdrawal. In 1799 the mulatto
general André Rigaud enlisted the aid of
Alexandre Pétion and Jean Pierre Boyer, asserted
mulatto supremacy, and launched a revolt against
Toussaint the uprising was quelled when Pétion
lost the southern port of Jacmel. In 1801,
Toussaint conquered Santo Domingo, and thus he
governed the whole island. By then professing
only nominal allegiance to France, he reorganized
the government and instituted public
improvements.
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Lest we forget Heroes and Heroines. Please
take a moment to read about them
Toussaint L'Ouverture contd Napoleon sent
(1802) a large force under General Leclerc to
subdue Toussaint, who had become a major obstacle
to French colonial ambitions in the Western
Hemisphere the Haitians, however, offered
stubborn resistance, and a peace treaty was
drawn. Toussaint himself was treacherously seized
and sent to France, where he died in a dungeon at
Fort-de-Joux, in the French Jura. His valiant
life and tragic death made him a symbol of the
fight for liberty, and he is celebrated in one of
Wordsworth's finest sonnets and in a dramatic
poem by Lamartine.
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Lest we forget Heroes and Heroines. Please
take a moment to read about them
Sojourner Truth (c. 1797 November 26, 1883) was
the self-given name, from 1843, of Isabella
Baumfree, an American abolitionist. Truth was
born into slavery in Swartekill, New York. Her
best-known speech, which became known as Ain't I
a Woman?, was delivered in 1851 at the Ohio
Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.
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Lest we forget Heroes and Heroines. Please
take a moment to read about them
Paul Bogle (1822 - 1865) was a Baptist Deacon and
a Jamaican rebel. Being a Christian, he helped
his congregation cope with the poverty and social
injustices they experienced by reading and
applying lessons from the Bible. During this
time, Bogle was one of only 104 men who could
vote in his community of St Thomas. He was a
leader of the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion, and was
captured in October 24 and executed by the United
Kingdom (Jamaica was a British colony at that
time). He was later named a National Hero of
Jamaica with the title Rt. Excellent Paul Bogle.
He is depicted on the heads side of the Jamaican
10-cent coin as such.
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Lest we forget Heroes and Heroines. Please
take a moment to read about them
Ignatius Sancho (1729-1780) is thought to have
been born a slave on a ship crossing the
Atlanticfrom Africa to the West Indies. His
earliest memories were of Greenwich, near London,
where he worked as a child slave. He persuaded
the powerful Montagu family to employ him as
their butler, an important position, before
retiring to run a grocery shop in Westminster. He
composed music, appeared on the stage, and
entertained many famous figures of literary and
artistic London. The first African we know of to
vote in a British election, he wrote a large
number of letters which were collected and
published in 1782, two years after his death. He
was thought of in his age as "the extraordinary
Negro", and to eighteenth-century British
opponents of the slave trade he became a symbol
of the humanity of Africans, then disputed by
many.
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Lest we forget Heroes and Heroines. Please
take a moment to read about them
Ottobah Cuguano, was born in the 1750s in West
Africa.  He came from a high-ranking family.  His
father was a companion to the local chief, and he
was brought up with the children of the chief. 
He then went to stay with an uncle who lived some
way from his home town.  Cuguano and his cousins
often went into the woods to play and hunt.  One
day, they were taken prisoner by a gang of men,
who accused them of a crime against the local
chief.  They were marched off and enslaved.  He
was taken to the coast, and sold through one of
the European trading forts.  He was taken by ship
across the Atlantic Ocean and sold to a
plantation-owner on the island of Grenada.  He
was then sold to a man who moved from Grenada to
England, and he came with him as his personal
servant.  He wrote Thoughts and Sentiments on the
Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and
Commerce of the Human Species, published 1787. 
By 1788 he was a free man, and working as
personal servant to Richard Cosway, who was the
court painter to the Prince of Wales.
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Lest we forget Heroes and Heroines
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Lest we forget Heroes and Heroines
Paul Bogle (1822 - 1865) was a Baptist Deacon and
a Jamaican rebel.
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Lest we forget Heroes and Heroines
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Lest we forget Heroes and Heroines
Samuel 'Sam' Sharpe National Hero of Jamaica was
born in 1801 in Jamaica.
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Lest we forget Heroes and Heroines
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Lest we forget Heroes and Heroines
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Lest we forget Heroes and Heroines
Bishop Samuel Adjai (Ajayi) Crowther (c. 1807
31 December 1891) was a linguist and the first
African Anglican bishop in Nigeria
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Lest we forget Heroes and Heroines
25
Lest we forget Bloomsburys Past
Extract from BloomsburysChurch Meeting Minutes
of 3 May 1851
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Lest we forget Slavery Today
Human Trafficking Chinese labourers were drowned
in the rising waters as they picked cockles in
Morecambe Bay in the northwest of England. They
were being paid the equivalent of less than 2 a
day.
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Lest we forget Slavery Today
In Niger, slavery was only criminalised in 2003 -
and the local human rights organisation Timidria
estimates 870,000 people are still held in
bondage there.
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Lest we forget Slavery Today
Modern day slavery is not usually associated with
the West - but tens of thousands of women are
trafficked there every year as sex workers and
forced labourers.
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Lest we forget Slavery Today
A sweatshop factory is one where workers are
abused in violation of that country's labour laws