Nineteenth-Century African American Speeches in Britain and Ireland

This is the first anthology of eighty speeches by forty-two world famous and under-researched African American freedom fighters, liberators and human rights campaigners living and working in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England in the nineteenth century.
Their pioneering and revolutionary works are supported by an in-depth introductory essay, author biographies, scholarly annotations and detailed bibliographies.

All these human rights orators testify to their lifelong ’fight for freedom’ across their radical and revolutionary works. All their lives, they warred against the ’sufferings and horrors’ of enslavement as a centuries-old ’cursed institution.’ ’Words are weapons’ in their fight for Black liberation. Across their life’s works, they all protested against the rise of the ’spirit of slavery’ in white supremacist and white racist US and British transatlantic societies.

Celeste-Marie Bernier is Professor of United States and Atlantic Studies at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She is the author/ editor/ curator of over 85 books, exhibitions, essays, and digital educational resources including the forthcoming Douglass Family Lives: Anna Murray and Frederick Douglass Family Biography and Collected Works eight book series.

Hannah-Rose Murray is a Lecturer in US History at Queen Mary, University of London, UK. Her first book, Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles, was published in 2020. Her accompanying website (www.frederickdouglassinbritain.com) maps thousands of Black activist speaking locations in Britain and Ireland and is the basis for her community and heritage work.

Queen Mary, University of London