Black Abolitionists In Ireland

The story of the anti-slavery movement in Ireland is little known, yet when Frederick Douglass visited the country in 1845, he described Irish abolitionists as the most ‘ardent’ that he had ever encountered. Moreover, their involvement proved to be an important factor in ending the slave trade, and later slavery, in both the British Empire and in America. While Frederick Douglass remains the most renowned black abolitionist to visit Ireland, he was not the only one. This publication traces the stories of ten black abolitionists, including Douglass, who travelled to Ireland in the decades before the American Civil War, to win support for their cause. It opens with former slave, Olaudah Equiano, kidnapped as a boy from his home in Africa, and who was hosted by the United Irishmen in the 1790s; it closes with the redoubtable Sarah Parker Remond, who visited Ireland in 1859 and chose never to return to America. The stories of these ten men and women, and their interactions with Ireland, are diverse and remarkable.

Building on the narratives explored in volume one, this publication recovers the story of a further seven Black visitors to Ireland in the decades prior to the American Civil War. This volume examines each of these seven activists and artists, and how their unique and diverse talents contributed to the movement to abolish enslavement and to the demand for Black equality. In an era that witnessed the rise of minstrelsy, they provided a powerful counter argument to the lie of Black inferiority. Moreover, their interactions with Irish abolitionists helped to build a strong transatlantic movement that had a global reach and impact. The lives explored are: Ira Aldridge (the African Roscius), William Henry Lane (Master Juba), William P. Powell, Elizabeth Greenfield (the Black Swan), Reuben Nixon, James Watkins and William H. Day. Individually and collectively they demonstrated the agency and power of Black involvement in the search for social justice. This book will be of value to students and scholars alike interested in modern European history and social and cultural history.

Although the significance of transatlantic currents of influence on slavery and abolition in the Americas has received substantial scholarly attention, the focus has tended to be largely on the British transatlantic, or on the effects of American racial politics on the emergence of Irish American political identity in the US. The specifics of Ireland’s role as a transnational hub of anti-slavery literary and political activity, and as deeply imbricated in debates around slavery and freedom, are often overlooked. This collection points to the particularity and significance of Ireland’s place in nineteenth-century exchanges around slavery and anti-slavery. Importantly, it foregrounds the context of empire – Ireland was both one of the ‘home’ nations of the UK, on many levels deeply complicit in British imperialism, and a space of emergent anti-colonial radicalism, bourgeois nationalism, and significant literary opportunity for Black abolitionist writers – as a key mediator of the ways in which the conceptual and practical responses to slavery and anti-slavery took shape in the Irish context. Moving beyond the transatlantic model often used to position debates around slavery in the Americas, it incorporates discussion around campaigns to abolish slavery within the empire, opening up the possibility of wider comparative discussions of slavery and anti-slavery around the Indian Ocean and the African continent. It also emphasizes the plurality of positions in play across class, political, racial and national lines, and the ways in which those positions shifted in response to changing social, cultural and economic conditions. This book was originally published as a special issue of Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies.

'When we strove to blot out the stain of slavery and advance the rights of man,' President Obama declared in Dublin in 2011, 'we found common cause with your struggle against oppression. Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave and our great abolitionist, forged an unlikely friendship right here in Dublin with your great liberator, Daniel O'Connell.' Frederick Douglass arrived in Ireland in the summer of 1845, the start of a two-year lecture tour of Britain and Ireland to champion freedom from slavery. He had been advised to leave America after the publication of his incendiary attack on slavery, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Douglass spent four transformative months in Ireland, filling halls with eloquent denunciations of slavery and causing controversy with graphic descriptions of slaves being tortured. He also shared a stage with Daniel O'Connell and took the pledge from the 'apostle of temperance' Fr Mathew. Douglass delighted in the openness with which he was received, but was shocked at the poverty he encountered. This compelling account of the celebrated escaped slave's tour of Ireland combines a unique insight into the formative years of one of the great figures of nineteenth-century America with a vivid portrait of a country on the brink of famine.

This book tackles a hitherto neglected topic by presenting Ireland as very much a part of the Black Atlantic world. It shows how slaves and sugar produced economic and political change in Eighteenth-century Ireland and discusses the role of Irish emigrants in slave societies in the Caribbean and North America.

Frederick Douglass, a former slave, spent four months in Ireland in 1845, filling halls with eloquent denunciations of slavery and causing controversy with graphic descriptions of slaves being tortured. He also shared a stage with Daniel O'Connell.

Beginning in the 9th century when the Vikings,traded North African slaves in Dublin, and,chronicling the accounts of later Irish peasants,who travelled with Norman lords on the crusades,against Islam, this detailed study uncovers,countless little-known facts about Ireland's long,history of racism. Despite the political links,between Ireland and many other colonised peoples,also explored in this book, Rolston and Shannon's,fascinating account reveals that the roots of,Irish racism are deeply embedded in its culture,and history. With 10 b/w illustrations.