Moral Mission Black and British: A Forgotten History

There's a story here in Jamaica that on the last day of July in the year

1828 people climbed up the hills and the mountains to watch the dawn.

It was at that moment,

after 50 years of campaigning by the abolitionists and after

centuries of rebellion and resistance by the slaves themselves,

slavery in the British Empire was finally over.

As the moment of abolition approached,

the slave owners had no idea what would happen next.

For years, they told people that slavery could never be ended

because, if it were, the black people would rise up

and they would kill the whites -

and they'd started to believe their own propaganda.

They were a tiny minority on an island surrounded

by a third of a million black people and they looked on, convinced

that their now former property, the people they'd exploited

and whipped, were going to rise up and take revenge.

But as dawn broke...

SINGING

..instead of seeking revenge, many of the former slaves went to church.

Queen Victoria had come to the throne just six weeks earlier and

the new Victorians saw the abolition of slavery as the dawn of a new age

of progress and enlightenment for Britain and its empire.

The fact that the former slaves had no possessions, the fact that almost

all the farmland was still in the hands of the White planters,

these details were just not allowed to get in the way of this

great moment of Victorian moral triumphalism.

But within 30 years, this Victorian sense of moral superiority

would come crashing down.

In this programme, we'll be remembering the people

and events in this extraordinary and often tragic period

of our history, when many saw the abolition of slavery

as a triumphant new beginning.

Peace to Africa.

Abolition changed how the Victorians saw themselves.

For many people,

being opposed to slavery became part of what it meant to be British.

Some people took it further.

They didn't want to just look down on other countries that still

tolerated slavery - they saw Britain as the moral leader of the world

and they turned their attentions to ending slavery everywhere.

For them, this was to be the great Victorian Moral Mission.

CHILDREN SING

One part of this global story took place here, in Sierra Leone.

In 1807, 31 years before the abolition of slavery,

Britain abandoned the Atlantic slave trade.

We know, we have got our...?

ALL: Freedom.

Freedom from what?

ALL: Slavery.

-And then they captured him again and freed him.

-Very good.

Let's clap for her. OK.

The history class these kids are having our is telling the story

of how some of their ancestors ended up here in Freetown, Sierra Leone,

so it's a really important part of their national history,

but it's also part of British history because many of their

ancestors were brought here in the 19th century by the Royal Navy

in what's got to be one of the most remarkable

and the most forgotten chapters in all of British history.

So, it's not good to be a slave.

When Britain abolished its own slave trade,

the other European powers didn't follow their example.

In 1808, the Royal Navy created a special force to suppress

the slave trade,

the West Africa Squadron.

For the whole of the 18th century,

the Royal Navy was here in the waters of West Africa

to defend the slave trade, to protect British slave ships

from the attentions of enemy powers.

In the 19th century,

and in what has to be one of the most bizarre transitions

in all of history, their job was to hunt down,

to intercept slave ships and to free the Africans onboard.

The West Africa Squadron was under-resourced and plagued by corruption.

It managed to intercept only around 6% of the slave ships

heading across the Atlantic.

But between 1808 and the 1860s, over 150,000 men, women

and children were liberated.

Some of their names are recorded in the Freetown archives.

So, Manga, who is 37, a man, five foot nine,

scar on the side of right of elbow.

And these are all children. A little boy of five, six...

This is a girl, she's 11 years old,

she is four feet ten and on each cheek she has this mark

and, rather than try to describe it, the registrar here

has drawn the mark, a tribal scar or a tattoo, that this girl has.

And there are many of these little, tiny illustrations in this book.

These are the tribal marks of pre-colonial Africans.

These are a little snapshot into the cultures.

And we sometimes forget,

slavery was designed to wipe people's cultures out.

These people had been caught just at the last moment.

They are on slave ships, they've been intercepted,

they've been brought back to Africa.

"Without name". This is a man who is 18 years old.

He is without a name, he is four feet eight and he's deaf and dumb,

and he was destined to become a slave.

(God!)

What sort of life would this poor guy have had

if he'd been taken to the New World and put on a plantation?

There's no guarantee that all these people went on to live free lives.

We know that some were forced into the Army,

others were kidnapped and sold back into slavery,

but some settled in Freetown.

The former slaves were known as the "re-captives" and they were

brought here, to the King's Yard,

to be counted and have their names recorded.

This gate is very significant because the moment you step out

of these gates you become a free man.

Slavery, as we all know,

may have lasted for a few centuries, but freedom lasts for ever.

CHILDREN SING

Today, the people of Freetown

are commemorating those who were liberated.

They are gathering before the gates of the King's Yard.

We realise that our great-great-grandfather was among

the re-captive slaves, which never reached the intended destination.

-The Royal Navy interceded...

-That's right.

..and they ended up here in Freetown.

Yes, and, as a result of that,

we were to able to identify our identity.

I mean to say, I was just the lucky few.

You see, they say many are caught, but few are chosen,

so we are the lucky ones amongst the lot.

Their shackles were cut-off, their wounds were dressed

and each received a piece of cotton clothing and some food.

In the name of God, alleluia!

-ALL: Amen!

-God bless us all.

They then walked through this gate to freedom.

Peace to Africa.

APPLAUSE

Bad things have been done,

but some good was now eventually coming out of the bad.

Britain's global crusade against the slave trade was anything but perfect.

And yet, if you were one of those slaves, on a slave ship,

captured by the Royal Navy, intercepted at sea,

and you had the shackles broken off your wrists and your feet

and you were landed here in Freetown, Sierra Leone,

as a free person then what had happened

and what happened here afterwards

was nothing short of a miracle.

In the 1850s, the West Africa Squadron

began to change its tactics.

They landed forces and attacked the bases

of European and African slave traders.

Now these attacks were justified

in that they helped suppress the slave trade,

but bit by bit and year by year what was happening

on the coast of West Africa began to become more colonial.

The anti-slave trade mission began to merge

with the opening phases of the colonisation of West Africa.

As well as force, the West Africa Squadron employed diplomacy

to persuade local African leaders to abandon the slave trade.

In 1850, when Frederick Forbes, a captain in the West Africa Squadron,

visited King Gezo of Dahomey, they exchanged diplomatic gifts,

but one of those gifts was not what Forbes was expecting.

On the 5th of July, Forbes tells us

he receives on behalf of Queen Victoria ten heads of cowries,

shells, a keg of rum and, in the middle of a list, a captive girl.

Forbes had a picture of the child printed.

And that gives her new name - Sara Forbes Bonetta.

Forbes, after Captain Forbes,

and Bonetta, after his ship, the HMS Bonetta.

So Captain Forbes, this rather famous, very well-respected officer

in the British West Africa Squadron,

whose task in life is to suppress the African slave trade,

now finds himself sailing back to Britain

with a slave child on board his ship,

and this little girl on her way to Britain

was to lead an absolutely remarkable life.

Cracking shot.

Soon after she arrived in Britain,

Sara was presented to Queen Victoria.

Go on. Beautiful shot.

Second.

She was just six years old.

Sara makes her first appearance in the private journals

of Queen Victoria on the day the two of them meet for the first time,

which is the 9th of November 1850.

The Queen describes her as,

"Sharp and intelligent and speaks English.

"She's dressed as any other girl but, when her bonnet was taken off,

"her little black woolly head and big earrings

"gave her the true negro type."

Now, what Sara made of this encounter,

this meeting with the most powerful woman on earth,

the woman to whom she had been given as a gift,

is something that we'll never know because,

like most of the black people who were drawn into British history

in this period, her words are lost to us.

Grandmother used to tell us about this ancestor

who was the adopted daughter of Queen Victoria,

but we didn't believe her because we just thought

this was an old lady rambling on about the past.

The Queen agreed to become Sara's protector.

She paid for her education,

which was undertaken by missionaries here at Palm Cottage in Kent,

which is now the local social club.

In the eyes of some people, Sara's life was to become

a social experiment and a rather patronising one.

This clearly bright child was to be used to demonstrate

that under British guidance an African could become educated,

Christianised and, in the buzz word of the 19th century, civilised.

In less than a year, Sara had made the astonishing transition

from being an enslaved orphan...

"Lieutenant Colonel North."

..to become a royal protege.

"Lieutenant Colonel Sir Jackson."

By the time she was an adult,

Sara had taken her place in Victorian high society.

And in this book, among all of these eminent Victorians,

there are arch dukes and members of the aristocracy,

you turn the page and suddenly

there's a page of these black Victorians.

These pictures of Sara were taken just after her wedding

to James Davies, a trader from Freetown

whose own parents had been liberated slaves.

About a month after they were married, Sara and James

came to London to attend the studio of Camille Silvy.

He was an aristocratic French portrait photographer

who was just the star of the day,

so to be in these books was a real statement.

It said that you had arrived,

that you were part of the Victorian elite.

And here are Sara Forbes Bonetta and James Davies.

James and Sara are the poster children of the Moral Mission.

They both could have been victims, in one way or another,

of the Atlantic slave trade and here they are in a book

with the rich and the powerful of 1860s London.

They're hybrid people. They're as much British as they are African.

They are in some ways living the lives that millions of people

live today, where we're not quite one thing and not quite the other.

It must have been incredibly disorientating

for a 19-year-old girl whose benefactor

is the Queen of Great Britain.

Today, members of Sara's family have come to Palm Cottage Social Club

to honour her life.

Hello there, members. Thanks very much for coming this afternoon.

I am glad to be here today to commemorate the life

of my great-great-grandmother.

She was a very accomplished person

and very strong willed to be able to survive in the situation.

I think she'd approve of everything we're doing today.

Sara and James had three children and they named their first

daughter Victoria after the Queen, who became the child's godmother.

She's been discovered for the first time for a lot of local people,

so hopefully we'll get enquiries about her history and members that

have been here today will pass on what they've learnt about her life.

Thank you all for coming to help me to unveil this plaque

to my great-great-grandmother,

who lived in a house on this very spot in 1855.

APPLAUSE

She has been written out of history,

but this will bring her back into history.

People should be proud that we are part of her life...

..that we are a part of history and hopefully we'll keep our club going

for many more years to come.

I feel very proud of her and I hope she is looking down on us

as we celebrate her life now.

During the years Sara was growing up in Britain,

the main focus of the Victorian Moral Mission was America.

Eloquent speakers who had escaped from slavery in the American South

captivated audiences the length and breadth of Britain

with shocking stories of life under slavery.

To British audiences, most of whom had never seen a slave before,

the arrival of these passionate, eloquent Black Americans

was an electrifying experience.

But in the 1840s, one clear superstar emerged on the anti-slavery scene

and that was Frederick Douglass,

who was one of the best speakers of his age or of any age.

Frederick Douglass arrived in Britain in 1845.

He'd just published his autobiography...

..and people flocked to his sell-out tour of Britain and Ireland.

By the time he arrived here in Dundee, in early 1846,

Frederick Douglass had already been on the road for six months.

So many people in this city wanted to hear him speak

that he had to give four separate lectures just to meet demand

and one of them took place here

in what was then the Bell Street Baptist Chapel.

"I came here because the slaveholders do not wish me to be here.

"I came here because those in slavery knew that this monster of darkness,

"which hates the light and to which the light of truth is death,

"could only live by being permitted to grope away in the darkness,

"crushing human hearts."

Glasgow-based poet Tawona Sithole

has been inspired by Frederick Douglass' work.

He was a confident speaker.

When he was in a room, people were definitely enchanted

by what he was saying.

He had a serious message but he also found a way of putting that

in a humorous way and I feel that breaks down so many barriers,

you know, so people are able to actually listen and engage.

"I came here because slavery is the common enemy of mankind.

"And to do all in my power to induce the humanity,

"morality and Christianity of the world

"to rise up and crush this demon of iniquity."

At the heart of the abolitionist message in the 1840s was a very simple idea -

it was that slavery wasn't a political issue, it was a moral issue.

And because it was moral, it could not be constrained behind borders.

Slavery anywhere was an affront to moral people everywhere,

but slavery in America WAS Britain's business.

It wasn't a national domestic issue for America -

it was a global moral crisis.

He was tall, broad and it was said he could turn women's heads.

Dr Peggy Brunache has studied Frederick Douglass' life and work.

When you saw him up there,

he was no different than everyone else in the room.

That was his point.

That there was a commonality to all of them.

Douglass' speeches compelled the sympathy and understanding

for the enslaved men and women in the southern states.

Even if you may have not supported slavery,

there were still built up stereotypes

of what a Black person was, a slave was,

and he crushed them all.

So now it's my great pleasure to invite everyone

to join us outside as we unveil the plaque.

He had a vision

and it's difficult carrying a vision

because not everyone around you can see.

His fight was unending.

He was unyielding.

He was for Black rights, he was for women's rights

and that alone is inspiring.

If one of us is not free then none of us are free.

APPLAUSE

In 1856, two of the most famous women in the world

arranged a secret rendezvous.

Almost every detail of it remains a mystery to this day.

We think it took place here, at King's Cross,

and one of those women was Queen Victoria.

The reason Queen Victoria was sneaking about in her own kingdom

was because, like pretty much everybody else in the 1850s,

she was fascinated by a new book

and she'd arranged to have a secret meeting

with its American author, Harriet Beecher Stowe.

This book was the bestselling book of the entire Victorian age.

It sold 1.5 million copies in Britain and the Empire.

It outsold every major work by every Victorian author -

Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, the Bronte sisters -

only the Bible sold more copies.

And yet, this is a book about Black people.

It's a book about slaves in the deep south of America.

It's a book that hardly anybody reads these days

and yet everybody's heard of -

it's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

"What is freedom to a nation but freedom to the individuals in it?

"What is freedom to that young man who sits there

"with his arms folded over his broad chest,

"the tint of African blood in his cheek, its dark fires in his eye?"

"No, no, no.

"My soul ain't yours, mas'r. You haven't bought it.

"Ye can't buy it.

"It's been bought and paid for by one that is able to keep me."

"And there was such a silence that the tick of the old tock

"could be heard measuring with silence touch

"the last moments of mercy and probation to that hardened heart."

The plot of Uncle Tom's Cabin is relatively simple -

it tells the story of a group of slaves from Kentucky

whose lives are turned upside down when some of them are sold

and others escape to avoid that fate.

One group does reach British Canada and freedom,

but Uncle Tom is murdered by the wicked slave owner Simon Legree.

And these Black characters -

Uncle Tom and Chloe, George and Eliza Harris, Topsy,

they become some of the most famous characters of the Victorian age.

They are every bit as famous as Oliver Twist or Jane Eyre

or David Copperfield.

They've been forgotten today,

but at the time everybody knew who they were.

Queen Victoria's meeting with Beecher Stowe was kept secret

because it was feared that it be seen as a royal intervention

in the battle against slavery in the United States.

Like many of her subjects, Victoria was deeply moved by the novel,

but its portrayal of Black people

is full of poisonous racial stereotypes.

Gary Young has written about its impact on the Victorian audience.

For Britain in the 1850s, this book's got everything going for it.

It's about American slavery rather than British slavery,

it's melodramatically written,

it's about the family, what we now call Victorian values,

so it's got hit written all over it.

Yes.

I mean, there's something about the crudeness of it,

the simplicity of it, the fact that it's like a targeted strike.

The strike is against slavery.

It's not against inequality, it's not against racism,

it's not against White supremacy.

It's against a specific institution and therefore, if your society

had gotten rid of slavery already, even if it was relatively recently,

then you have the capacity, if you so wish, to feel smug.

One way that one might understand that smugness, people looking

at Black Lives Matter in America and thinking at least in Britain

we don't shoot Black people dead in the street.

Now the fact that there's vast inequalities with unemployment,

the fact that people are dying in police custody and so on,

well, yeah, yeah, yeah, they're...

but we're not doing that.

And if you look at the success of the book, it hit its mark.

While a novel about slavery became the bestselling book of the age...

Victorian popular music was adopting musical styles and instruments

that had been pioneered by enslaved Africans in the American South.

This is one of the first pieces of moving film shot anywhere in Britain

and it was shot on these streets here in Soho

about 120 years ago, back in the 1890s.

It's a scene of Black-faced minstrels.

These are White guys who have blacked up their faces

and they're performing African-American music

on instruments like banjos and guitars.

Now to us this music, this phenomena, is really uncomfortable.

But if we can put that aside for one moment,

there is an amazing story because this was a global entertainment

and it was as popular in this country as it was in America.

Minstrel music became the sound of the Victorian Street...

..and the toxic racial stereotypes in minstrelsy

took root in our culture.

The Black and White Minstrel Show

was a staple of British television right up until 1978.

Rhiannon Giddens is reclaiming the African-American origins

of this hugely influential musical tradition.

Those are all 1855 tunes.

I know from everything I've read that Black-faced minstrelsy,

in its early stages, could be anti-slavery,

could be opposing slavery,

and yet I know that intellectually and emotionally

I find that really difficult to accept.

Yes. I mean, I think that's the most important thing

to get across about minstrelsy is that it was complicated

and it wasn't, I mean...

It wasn't wholly evil.

A lot of the early songs, even though they still contain a lot of offensive language,

a lot of the early songs are lots of pining for lost love

or, you know, not being treated well.

On the one hand, it's like there is a lot of that longing melancholy

and, on the other hand, there is still horrible racist statements.

So, for me, there's something that's very healing about writing songs

that are actually from a slave's point of view,

or enslaved people's point of view,

on this instrument that really is America's first instrument.

That was the language that they helped create, that they were allowed.

I feel like I could do a lot worse

than be in a line of Black banjo players,

you know? I mean, it's like...the more I learn about it,

the more proud I am of being of colour.

# Julie oh Julie won't you run

# Cos I see down yonder the soldiers have come

# Julie oh Julie can't you see

# Them devils have come to take you far from me?

# Mistress oh mistress I won't run. #

There's this whole lost chapter of Black music

that is inaccessible to us because of Black-faced stuff,

but a lot of people don't want to go there.

We can't let it be inaccessible.

# And I'll stay right here till they come for me. #

There's this whole area of 50 or 60 years that we're leaving out

and it's like, that's the important stuff.

It's deeply in the culture and I think that,

if we want to get to the heart of it, that's a big piece.

# Mistress oh mistress I wish you well

# But in leaving here

# I'm leaving hell. #

This is the state of Mississippi.

In the mid-19th century, it was one of the richest places in the world...

..and much of this wealth was built on the backs

of millions of enslaved Africans.

Today, the Deep South seems like a rather genteel sort of place

but in the 1840s and the 1850s this was one of the most dynamic,

most fast-moving and most brutal places in the world

and it was the centre of an absolutely globalised industry.

Cotton from the Mississippi Valley made up more than half

of all America's exports

and the slaves themselves, their lives and their bodies,

they were the most valuable commercial asset

in the American economy.

So people who lived in houses like this used to have a phrase that they

liked to use to remind everyone just how important their industry was.

They used to say, "Cotton is king".

Cotton and slaves were shipped down the Mississippi by paddle steamer...

..to be sold in the markets of places like New Orleans.

But the plantations of Mississippi were just one half of

a global industry.

And that's because the vast majority of the cotton that came off

these fields and that was shipped down this river

went to the mills and factories of Britain.

And the slaves, the people who worked these fields,

the people who were bought and sold in the slave markets of

New Orleans, their labour wasn't just making their owners rich,

it was fuelling Britain's Industrial Revolution.

American cotton was spun and woven into cloth in the great mills

and factories of Lancashire and Cheshire.

By the 1860s, nearly half a million people

were employed in the cotton mills.

And, for each direct employee,

another three people were supported by their wages.

And that is the great contradiction within the Victorian Moral Mission

because abolitionist anti-slavery Britain

was economically dependent upon American cotton,

which meant she was up to her neck in American slavery.

Across Britain, four million people

were to some degree reliant upon cotton.

When I was growing up in the North of England, THIS is the history that

I was taught at school - the history of the Industrial Revolution,

and I was told that this was MY history

because it was the heritage of the white

working-class side of my family.

And I came on school trips to

places like this and I learnt about Spinning Jenny's and water frames

and the terrible conditions,

but I was never told, not once,

that the cotton that made places like this so incredibly profitable

was produced by slaves 3,000 miles away in the Deep South.

And we talk about the Industrial Revolution and Black history

as if they are completely separate, but in the middle of

the 19th century, cotton clothes, produced with cotton picked

by Black people in the Deep South, were Britain's biggest exports.

The Black slaves of America never set foot on British soil,

but they ARE part of British history.

This was the great blind spot of the Victorian Moral Mission.

Britain was making a fortune from cotton grown by enslaved Africans.

In 1861, the slave-owning southern states of America

went to war against the anti-slavery north.

The northern government established a naval blockade on the

southern cotton trade...

..and the free flow of cotton from the Mississippi Valley

came to an abrupt halt.

What followed was a social and economic disaster.

Lancashire fell into the grip of what became known as

the Cotton Famine.

Relief committees were set up, riots broke out and, by the end of 1862,

nearly half a million people were in receipt of some form of charity.

And the Northern American states came to Lancashire's aid.

If you want to get a picture of just how bad things got for

the people of Lancashire then this barrel can tell you that story

because it talks to you, it tells you its own story in its own words,

it even speaks in the first person!

"I am one of the thousands of barrels that was filled with flour

"and sent by the free states of America in the ship

"the George Griswold to the starving people of Lancashire,

"whose misery was caused by the aggressive Civil War

"of the slave owners."

This is a relic from what we would today call humanitarian aid -

food that was sent by the northern states to the people of the

North West of England to help them survive the Cotton Famine.

But, more than that, this is also a piece of propaganda.

It's there to remind everybody, on both sides of the Atlantic,

that what this war was about is slavery.

The British Government remained officially neutral

in the American Civil War.

But many people in Britain, both rich and poor,

supported the southern, slave-owning states...

..nowhere more so than in Liverpool.

The city had grown rich as a slave-trading port.

But following abolition, Liverpool's shipping magnates had swapped

their human cargo for cotton.

By the time of the Civil War, 85% of all the cotton that left

New Orleans flowed up the Mersey and was landed in these docks.

Now, many of the city's merchants and traders were facing

financial ruin and they were willing to do whatever it took

to break the blockade.

The arms manufacturers of Liverpool simply ignored their own

government's declaration of neutrality and, in this shipyard,

warships were constructed for the Confederate Navy.

One of them, the CSS Alabama,

intercepted 65 northern ships.

Not only had it been built on Merseyside,

many of its crewmen were local men.

Arming the Confederate states made the traders and manufacturers

of Liverpool a fortune.

The Government, for the most part, turned a blind eye.

And as the mills shut their doors and thousands of people lost

their jobs, it's hardly surprising

that most of Lancashire's mill towns came out in support

of the cotton-producing states of the South.

Most, but not all.

The town of Rochdale was one of the towns worst hit

by the Cotton Famine.

What was happening here was happening right across the

Lancashire Valley - people were leaving their homes and

travelling from town to town, desperate to find work.

Even when they were hungry and destitute, thousands of workers

in Rochdale stood in solidarity with the slaves of America.

But the Cotton Famine was a mounting crisis.

One response to the crisis was to start schemes of public works

and this road is a result

of one of those schemes.

What happened is that unemployed mill workers from down there

in the Lancashire Valley were brought up here, onto the moors,

with spades and shovels and pickaxes, and they cut this road

right across the valley,

right across the landscape.

This is still called by the name it was given back then,

in the 19th century, it's the Cotton Famine Road.

JAUNTY FOLK MUSIC PLAYS

This is slavery, this is Black history as we think of it,

colliding into the lives of White working-class people.

And it's for that reason, for that sacrifice,

that the people here are rightly proud of what their ancestors did.

I very much look at the road as really

a sort of scar that's been left in the landscape.

But whilst they were suffering, they were very clear about what

was right and what was wrong

and, clearly, slavery was wrong.

I'd like extend a special welcome to the Lord Mayor and

the Lady Mayoress of Rochdale.

My ancestors worked in the cotton mills in Rochdale and they

were badly affected by the Cotton Famine.

"We have fathers sitting in the house at midday,

"silent and glum,

"while children look wistfully about and

"sometimes whimper for bread which they cannot have."

There was a young child in the family, she was only six-month old

in 1861, so it would have been a very difficult time for them.

Everyone knew what was going on and they knew the reason that

they were fighting this, and they just buckled to and went through it

and said, "It's tough, but it's not as tough for us as it is for them".

It gives me the greatest pleasure that we unveil this in the memory

of the hardships of the past and the future of this new group and

committee who've made this happen today. Well done. Thank you so much.

APPLAUSE

I'm from Rochdale.

There's something about Rochdale that it's just got that certain

"je ne sais quoi". It's that grit,

determination and guts to say, "This is the right thing",

you know, "This is the right thing - let's do it".

And I'd like to say I would do it, I'd like to say I would.

-Well, you're from Rochdale, so history says you would!

-Yes!

I probably WOULD, yeah!

While the Cotton Famine was undermining the Moral Mission...

..another crisis had been growing in Jamaica.

In the decades after the abolition of slavery,

the sugar islands of the British West Indies that had once been

so incredibly profitable started to go into decline.

There was competition from other producers and, here on Jamaica,

much of the soil was exhausted and some of the planters started

to go bankrupt. They went back to Britain,

leaving the old houses and the old factories to fall into ruins.

What you had on Jamaica by the 1860s

was thousands of acres that no-one was farming

and hundreds of thousands of former slaves

who had no work and no land.

To make matters worse, Jamaica suffered the worst drought

that anyone could remember - people were desperate.

The spark that ignited the flame took place in the small town of Morant Bay.

It began with a case in this courthouse over the eviction

of a man who'd been farming on an abandoned estate.

It's really hard to work out, 150 years later, exactly where

everything took place, but we do know that a crowd of about 500 to

600 local people had gathered here in front of the courthouse and that,

on the stairs of the courthouse, the local militia had gathered.

They are local White men, a form of territorial Army.

And up there, the local magistrate

began to read the riot act to the crowds.

At some point, people in the crowd began to throw stones and,

at that point, the militia opened fire on the crowd,

but the crowd then attacked this building and began to burn it down.

The militia killed seven people

and another 18 were killed by the crowd,

including the local magistrate.

But, shortly after, the violence subsided.

This had been a serious local incident,

but, in the grand scheme of things,

this was a riot in a backwater town in a part of the Empire

that no longer mattered very much.

The reason why every Jamaican has heard of Morant Bay is

because of what happened next.

On the orders of the Governor of Jamaica, Edward Eyre,

the Army was unleashed.

The militia swarmed into the region

and hundreds of innocent Jamaicans were killed -

some were executed.

It was a brutal act of vengeance,

even by the low standards of the 19th century.

Professor Clinton Hutton has spent years researching what many

Jamaicans call the Morant Bay War.

What had happened at Morant Bay was still very localised,

not that many people had been involved,

-but the governor didn't see it that way, did he?

-No.

He saw it in the context of Black insurrection

against White authority.

Eyre was responding to Black fear,

the fear of Black uprising.

The basis for somebody being punished,

for somebody being killed,

for somebody being whipped or somebody's house being burnt

was the colour of your skin.

The slave-owning class in Jamaica

were still in power after emancipation

and so the policy of the colonial government was to do

everything to prevent people of African descent from owning the

means and acquiring and accessing the means of their own livelihood.

The idea that Black people should have the right

to rule their own destiny...

..that was the furthest thing from their mind.

After Morant Bay, old ideas that claimed Black people

were innately savage were revived and they were given greater potency

by new pseudoscientific theories about race.

LIVE MUSIC PLAYS

It's largely been forgotten in Britain,

but, for Jamaicans everywhere,

Morant Bay remains a raw memory.

It's so painful that that pain will never go away.

I grieve and mourn the loss of my ancestors.

At Stony Gut, a Jamaican village that was burnt to the ground

in the reprisals, people are gathering to remember the victims.

This ceremony is a reminder

that we should be the bearers of the torch for freedom.

And, in Britain, an identical plaque will be unveiled

at the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton.

This idea of "celebrate" is an interesting one.

Of course we can say "celebrate",

but, actually, to celebrate doesn't quite do it.

I remember my grandmother telling me about the streets running with

blood in Morant Bay and about the slaughter of many Black Jamaicans.

My ancestors were killed by British forces...

..that came to Stony Gut shooting,

burning houses, killing people,

slaughtering young babies and pregnant mothers.

That is what I call total annihilation of a set of people.

I think it's important to remember stories like this

because Black British history is British history.

You know, Britain wouldn't be what it is

if it wasn't for the transatlantic slave trade.

Remembering this history means that I can place myself

in the community that I live in.

If we can see ourselves in the history books,

reflected back positively,

it has a direct impact on our sense of self,

on our sense of what we can achieve.

Those more uncomfortable histories can often be difficult things

for people to take on board,

but it's very important that we do commemorate the difficult parts

of history as well as the more celebratory ones.

I now have the great pleasure of unveiling this plaque.

One, two...three!

APPLAUSE

We are stronger by doing things like this as we have done today

and we will galvanise the community around such things,

create the energy that propels us forward.

The rise and fall of the Victorian Moral Mission sheds new light

on some defining moments in our history...

..from the abolition of slavery...

..to the Industrial Revolution...

..and it reminds us of those who were caught up in

the great battle of ideas that divided the country and Empire.

More than 150 years after Morant Bay,

these stories can now be retold and remembered.

The people of Jamaica remember Morant Bay as

a pivotal moment in their history, but it's also a watershed

in British history because it is the moment in which

new racial ideas are unleashed and given their full voice.

It is a moment in which the old ideas, the old Moral Mission,

is declared dead and over.

Next time...

the fall of Empire

and the century of struggle...

He could have been my brother, he could have been your son.

..to be both Black and British.

If you'd like to find out how to research Black history in your

area, there's an iWonder guide

with links to our partners at...