MS Humanities: Slavery: People & Places

Olaudah Equiano also known as Gustavus Vassa, was a prominent African involved in the British movement for the abolition of the slave trade. He was enslaved as a child in his home town of Essaka in what is now south eastern Nigeria, shipped to the West Indies, moved to England, and successfully purchased his freedom. Throughout his life Equiano worked as an author, a seafarer, merchant, hairdresser, and explorer in South and Central America, the Caribbean, and the Arctic, the American colonies, and the United Kingdom, where he settled by 1792. His autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, depicts the horrors of slavery and influenced the enactment of the Slave Trade Act of 1807.

François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture, also Toussaint L'Ouverture, Toussaint-Louverture, Toussaint Bréda, nicknamed The Black Napoleon , was the leader of the Haitian Revolution. His military genius and political acumen transformed an entire society of slaves into the independent state of Haiti. The success of the Haitian Revolution shook the institution of slavery throughout the New World.

Ignatius Sancho was a composer, actor, and writer. He is the first known Black Briton to vote in a British election. He gained fame in his time as "the extraordinary Negro", and to 18th-century British abolitionists he became a symbol of the humanity of Africans and immorality of the slave trade. The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, edited and published two years after his death, is one of the earliest accounts of African slavery written in English by a former slave of Spanish and English families.

Read free online via this website: 12years.org

Librivox offers a free audio version here: Free on iTunes - Free MP3 Stream/Download.

Books in the East campus Secondary Library: click here

Thomas Clarkson, spent his long adult life working to abolish the Transatlantic Slave Trade and slavery itself.

William Wilberforce was an English politician who became the voice of the abolition movement in Parliament. 

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Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Harriet Ross; ) was an African-American abolitionist, humanitarian, and Union spy during the American Civil War. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made more than nineteen missions to rescue more than 300 slaves using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. She later helped John Brown recruit men for his raid on Harpers Ferry, and in the post-war era struggled for women's suffrage.

Abby Kelley Foster was an American abolitionist and radical social reformer active from the 1830s to 1870s. She became a fundraiser, lecturer and committee organizer for the influential American Anti-Slavery Society, where she worked closely with William Lloyd Garrison and other radicals. She married fellow abolitionist and lecturer Stephen Symonds Foster, and they both worked for equal rights for women.

Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey), was an African-American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing. He stood as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Many Northerners also found it hard to believe that such a great orator had been a slave.

The library has three books you may be interested in:

Life and times of Frederick Douglass written by himself 

The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass 

They had a dream : the civil rights struggle, from Frederick Douglass to Marcus Garvey to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X

Abraham Lincoln's position on slavery was one of the central issues in American history. Lincoln often expressed moral opposition to slavery in public and private.

Click here to access the starter bibliography for the Grade 8 Humanities research project on slavery.

The Underground Railroad was a network of secret routes and safe houses used by 19th-century slaves of African descent in the United States to escape to free states and Canada with the aid of abolitionists and allies who were sympathetic to their cause.

The Slave Trade Act was an Act of Parliament made in the United Kingdom passed on 25 March 1807, with the title of "An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade".  The act abolished the slave trade in the British Empire, but not slavery itself. Many of the Bill's supporters thought the Act would lead to the death of slavery. It was not until 26 years later that slavery itself was actually abolished.