A few days ago in Liverpool, England, a new museum opened to remind present day Britons of their slave holding past. This year marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Great Britain.
The museum was the vision of Mr. Richard Benjamin, who manages the facility.
“Benjamin, 35, who recently earned his doctorate at the University of Liverpool, has explored black identity through the prism of archaeology in his scholarly work. Based on that research, and his interest in being a mentor to Liverpool students from diverse ethnic backgrounds, he says he wants the museum to be a tool for ‘empowerment.’
‘If I had to choose one word for the museum, it would be resistance,’ he said as he escorted a visitor past displays that were being given last-minute touches by curators. ‘Trans-Atlantic slavery was not such a passive thing. Africans kept their culture. We want to educate people to understand that black people does not equal “oppression.” (1)
Due to the notoriety surrounding the publication of “The Narrative,” the newfound freedom of Frederick Douglass was in imminent danger. He decided to spend a few years abroad in Great Britain. Here were some recollections from his experience in England.
“As I have before intimated, the publishing of my “Narrative” was regarded by my friends with mingled feelings of satisfaction and apprehension. They were glad to have the doubts and insinuations which the advocates and apologists of slavery had made against me proved to the world to be false, but they had many fears lest this very proof would endanger my safety, and make it necessary for me to leave a position which in a signal manner had opened before me, and one in which I had thus far been efficient in assisting to arouse the moral sentiment of the community against a system which had deprived me, in common with my fellow-slaves, of all the attributes of manhood.
I became myself painfully alive to the liability which surrounded me, and which might at any moment scatter all my proud hopes and return me to a doom worse than death. It was thus I was led to seek a refuge in monarchical England from the dangers of republican slavery. A rude, uncultivated fugitive slave, I was driven to that country to which American young gentlemen go to increase their stock of knowledge, to seek pleasure, and to have their rough democratic manners softened by contact with English aristocratic refinement…
My visit to England did much for me every way. Not the least among the many advantages derived from it was the opportunity it afforded me of becoming acquainted with educated people and of seeing and hearing many of the most distinguished men of that country. My friend Mr. Wendell Phillips, knowing something of my appreciation of orators and oratory, had said to me before leaving Boston: ‘Although Americans are generally better speakers than Englishmen, you will find in England individual orators superior to the best of ours.’ I do not know that Mr. Phillips was quite just to himself in this remark, for I found few, if any, superior to him in the gift of speech. When I went to England that country was in the midst of a tremendous agitation. The people were divided by two great questions of “Repeal”–the repeal of the corn laws and the repeal of the union between England and Ireland.”
Source: “The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass,” Chapter VI: Impressions Abroad.
Reference
(1) “Slavery: Resistance amid the horror,” by Jane Perlez, International Herald Tribune, 23 August 2007.
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