The radicals

“The price of human flesh on the Mississippi was regulated by the price of cotton in Manchester.” Born into US chattel slavery in Maryland, Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) – freedom fighter, abolitionist, author, editor, orator, and artist – was unafraid of challenging white supremacism, and the way it deliberately obscured the story of how Mancunians and countless other British people allowed US enslavement to survive.
Douglass visited Manchester in 1846 and 1847 during his first trip to Britain and Ireland. Building on the work of other freedom fighters such as Moses Roper, who had previously lectured in the city, Douglass made St Ann’s Square his temporary home and collaborated with local reformers such as Rebecca Moore and John Bright. He lectured in the town hall, the Free Trade Hall, the Corn Exchange (in Hanging Ditch) and the Baptist chapel on Grosvenor Street, and organised antislavery meetings in nearby towns including Oldham, Rochdale and Stockport. During one blistering speech in Manchester in December 1846, he declared that “the slaveholder was a thief and a robber” of the bodies and souls of the enslaved, and encouraged British churches to condemn slavery and practise non-fellowship with their American religious brethren. A month later, Douglass powerfully spoke of the weapons of torture used against enslaved people – “the whip, the gag, the thumbscrew, and the use of the chain” – and argued that violence was one of the central pillars of enslavement in the US. Demonstrating his allegiance with Black Britons, during another meeting a young Black man named Thomas Wilson joined Douglass briefly on the platform to denounce slavery.
After Douglass returned to the US, he continued to forge links with Manchester. During the “cotton famine” of 1862 (a direct result of a Union blockade of Confederate ports during the American civil war), Douglass wrote The Slave’s Appeal to Great Britain, a hard-hitting anti-Confederate message that was published in local newspapers. He argued that, despite the hardship Mancunians faced from the famine, they should not support the “blood-stained fingers of the impious slaveholding Confederate States of America”, an alliance that rested on enslavement and white supremacy. “Welcome not those brazen human fleshmongers,” Douglass wrote, “those brokers in the bodies and souls of men” whose unholy union was only matched by Britain’s greed in importing goods produced by enslaved labour.
At the end of the civil war, the Manchester Times reprinted extracts from letters Douglass had written to English abolitionists. Determined as ever to fight unceasingly for social and racial justice, he declared that African Americans “must have the cartridge box, the jury box and the ballot box to protect them”.

The fifth Pan-African Congress, held in Manchester in 1945, has been hailed as a watershed moment, bringing together some of the future leaders of Africa’s soon-to-be independent nations. One of the central figures of that landmark meeting was local businessman T Ras Makonnen (1909–1983), a pan-Africanist and philanthropist.
Born George Thomas Nathaniel Griffiths in Guyana (then British Guiana), he was educated in the US and in 1936 emigrated to the UK. His early exposure to the Black nationalist Marcus Garvey’s work in Guyana was to make a lasting impression on him and his sense of injustice over the impact of colonial powers. He changed his name in solidarity with Ethiopia, which Italy invaded in 1935.
Makonnen became a strong and vocal anti-imperialist campaigner, wanting to see an end to acts of oppression across the British empire. Hence, working closely with colleagues George Padmore and Peter Millard, he seized the opportunity to throw his ideological, organisational and financial support behind the 1945 congress, which was attended by luminaries such as Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta and WEB Du Bois.
Once established in Manchester, Makonnen wanted to spread pan-African education to a wide audience, so he went into publishing and established the Pan African Publishing Company. Fellow directors included Padmore, Millard and the future Kenyan president Jomo Kenyatta. This venture was subsidised by the takings from the restaurants Makonnen owned. He once stated: “I did not regard these restaurants as mine, nor the takings for that matter. This was what the pan-African thing was all about.”

Elouise Edwards (1932 –2021) was a social justice activist dedicated to elevating the life chances of some of Manchester’s most disadvantaged groups. In Moss Side, where she lived, there can hardly be a household that has not benefited in some way from her work, whether aware of it or not.
Born in Guyana (then British Guiana) in December 1932, Elouise Chandler – or Mama Edwards, as she was later known – was 28 when she left her homeland to join her husband in the UK. She was reportedly not excited by the prospect. Britain then, as now, was an inhospitable place for immigrants, even those “subjects of the British empire” with the right to live in the UK.
Edwards’ house was a stone’s throw from the birthplace of the suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst. She did not follow directly in Pankhurst’s wake, however, for she could not settle on women’s equality as her sole focus. Her early campaigns may have predated Alice Walker’s coining of the term “womanism” and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s seminal work on intersectionality, yet I think of her as an intersectional Black womanist. She recognised that the intersections of gender, race and class oppression harmed Black women in particular ways, and their children and their men too – though Black men’s oppression has never prevented the exercise of patriarchal values that seek to control women. Even in her early days, Edwards recognised the need to create safe women-only spaces so as to be freed of male interference and to enable the growth of women’s leadership.
Over a 50-year period, Edwards founded or was actively involved in more than 35 organisations and campaigns tackling a gamut of social and health issues, including housing inequalities (she co-founded the Arawak housing association) and cultural marginalisation (she was chair of the Nia arts centre). Her work also led to the establishment of a sickle cell and thalassaemia centre. With others, she worked to reduce youth crime too – and though no apologist for violence of any shade, it was the indiscriminate violence of the police that most raised her ire. She exposed police brutality whenever it raised its head, and railed against the apparent indifference of the police to Black victims of crime.
A mother of four boys, her most persistent campaigning was for improvements to the education system. Throwing the spotlight on a curriculum she believed was designed to serve empire, Edwards argued that teaching incomplete histories and relegating Black people’s achievements to the margins was a form of cultural apartheid. In 1977 she founded Roots, a community arts and education project that produced an alternative Black-centred history curriculum for schools. She also believed that promoting sport for Black children at the expense of academic subjects was nothing less than institutionalised racism.
In many cases Mama Edwards had been instigator, leader or strategist behind a particular initiative’s success. She was not averse to confrontation – it was clear she considered passivity in the face of oppression as complicity – but it was more her style to enter a room and quietly transform the distance between people into a space for negotiation.
In taking up everyday responsibility for alleviating the effects of injustice, Edwards made such work ordinary, perhaps even unremarkable. In these extraordinary times, we should perhaps be reminded that fighting for change is our ordinary, everyday work too. When Elouise Edwards spoke the words: “It’s so important to remember that you are part of a line of people who elevated this country,” she was asking us not to recognise her worth, but our own.

Every Black History Month the Old Abbey Taphouse pub in Manchester hosts its annual drink for Len Johnson (1902-1974). In October 1953, Johnson walked into that pub and ordered a round of drinks. The landlord informed him that they did not serve Black people and that a “colour bar” was in operation. The police were called and Johnson was forced to leave. This was not unusual in postwar Manchester. But Johnson’s response, as he refused to accept the injustice, was. He returned to the pub with crowds of supporters and, four days later, was finally invited back inside to take a drink with the landlord. The “colour bar” was officially overturned.
Despite this victory, the story was barely reported. Johnson too was all but forgotten. It would take a new movement to push his legacy into the light and reveal a hidden Manchester of institutional racism, working-class resistance and Black British staying power.
Leonard Benker Johnson was born in Clayton, east Manchester. His father, William, had come from Sierra Leone as a merchant seaman. Like a small but growing number of Black seamen, William settled in Manchester, where he met Margaret Maher, a Mancunian – “Irish and proud of it”, as her son recalled – who worked as a pinafore machinist. Their marriage led to experiences of vicious racism, with Margaret violently attacked, and her own family disowning her. Instead the couple found lodgings with the Connell family, a bricklayer and his wife. As Len Johnson wrote, the lengths to which the Connells went to welcome the young man from Africa and his wife, becoming the couple’s self-appointed parents, was for the time almost unbelievable.
Growing up, Len was trained by his father as a boxer and by 1920 was fighting professionally as a middleweight. By 1928 the national newspapers were describing him as Britain’s “uncrowned champion”. But the “colour bar” had been directly written into British boxing’s constitution in 1911, with the support of the home secretary at the time, Winston Churchill. Nevertheless, the papers argued it was “tolerably certain” that Johnson would have won the British title if only he had been given the chance. In 1930 Johnson announced his retirement from the ring, explaining that he was “fed up with the whole business”. He said: “I am barred from the Albert Hall, from the National Sporting Club and from all fights where there is big money. The prejudice against colour has prevented me from getting a championship bout, although I consider I am well worthy of one.” It was in this same year that he met the actor, singer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson and they formed a friendship that “put new life” into Johnson. As he recalls, Robeson had told him “my job was fighting, and that if I could fight in the ring I ought to be able to fight outside it. I took his words to heart and made every effort to show the British public that the colour bar is just so much nonsense.”
Johnson joined the civil defence rescue squad in Manchester during the second world war, and by the end of it had joined the Communist party. In the postwar years he threw himself into community organising in Moss Side. He attended the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester as a Communist party observer, sitting side by side with future leaders of independent African nations to discuss a world free from colonial rule. The following year Johnson co-founded the New International Club in Moss Side, whose aims were “true internationalism, colonial liberation, peace and the ending of race discrimination”.
During a period where the “colour bar” was common, the club provided a space “where people of all lands could meet fraternally”. The club organised antiracism campaigns, such as opposing separate queues for “coloured” and “white” people at the Manchester labour exchange. At the club’s height, thousands came to see Robeson there during his visit to Manchester.
To earn a living, Johnson drove an articulated truck “with the precision that made him a champion”, according to a newspaper Where Are They Now? column. His later years were spent in poverty and ill health, and in the years after his death, his memory was kept alive by only a handful of individuals, mainly from the Working Class Movement Library. Yet after the Black Lives Matter movement, the story of this “uncrowned champion” was rediscovered, and he is now finding a new place in Manchester’s history.

The details we can uncover and piece together of Henry Baker’s unusual life highlight the complexity of Britain’s deep and long legacies of, and connections to, enslavement. They bring to light a remarkable journey from Manchester to west Africa, to Barbados and back to north-west England.
Everything we know about lives in the past comes from scattered impressions that remain of a person’s presence, however shallow and incomplete. The work of history is to draw those fragments together and re-present them in ways that inform the present and the future.
For those who were enslaved, those imprints are rare indeed, and the small proportion that survive are partial – in every sense – given that most records were created by enslavers recording details of significance to them, not to the individuals whom the information concerned.
The slave trading manifests of the Liverpool trafficker William Davenport are incredibly rare in allowing us to trace the names of every Manchester manufacturer that supplied textiles to exchange for human cargoes, as well as naming every enslaver who purchased captive Africans from those voyages on Caribbean auction blocks.
Using the Legacies of British Slavery database, we can then trace the plantations where those trafficked people were taken and forced into enslaved labour. Henry Coulthurst appears repeatedly in the list of Barbados enslavers purchasing trafficked people from these Manchester-supplied journeys.
In some cases, we can then trace those estates decades later in the Registers (a form of census) that were made of every enslaved person in the British colonies from 1817 to 1832. This historical equivalent of a needle-in-a-haystack led to Fairfield, part of the Coulthurst estates, where in 1820 we learn that an 11-year-old house servant named Henry is “now in England” – a rare detail.
We know that Henry lived through the most significant slave rebellion in Barbadian history as a child, survived the devastating hurricane of 1831 in which two people in his community died, and was at Fairfield in 1832 on the eve of abolition.
Tracing the Coulthurst family leads us to Sandiway Cottage, Cheshire, where in the 1841, 1851 and 1861 censuses Henry Baker, a butler born in Barbados, is said to have resided.
Given the scant documentation of the vast majority of enslaved lives, being able to trace a single person’s experience in such detail acts as an important form of memorialisation and acknowledgment, as well as giving visibility to the presence and experiences of a Black British citizen in 19th-century rural Cheshire.
Henry’s experience was atypical. As a man of mixed African and European heritage, his work as a house servant was relatively privileged compared with the majority of those enslaved in Barbados who laboured on sugar plantations. His daily life and the opportunities available and limitations imposed upon him were still shaped by his status as the property of the Coulthursts.
His relationships with them were complicated. After emancipation, when opportunities for the formerly enslaved were limited, Henry found a place in the household of four sisters in England, whom he is likely to have met on his first trip to England as a boy, implying significant personal connections.
Yet those sisters, two of whom were around his age, were wealthy heiresses living off the proceeds of the family sugar plantations and the £3,072 (about £300,000 today) recompense from the government for their human property held in the persons of Henry and his community. The formerly enslaved received nothing.
Having found Henry’s burial record at St Mary’s church, Whitegate, I was not confident of finding any further trace, but began a grave-by-grave search, finally stumbling upon the large monuments to the Coulthursts , their size an indication of the wealth and standing that their slave-owning activities had secured them.
And then, on the next row, there he was: Henry Baker of Sandiway.
From his headstone alone you would never know where he had been born, the unusual life he led, or his connection to the Coulthursts. But in this rural Cheshire churchyard remains a solid fragment marking his life.
A fragment which encourages us to reflect on the millions of enslaved lives, so many undocumented and unmarked, and the tangled, transatlantic connections whose legacies we are only beginning to unravel.

Sarah Parker Remond (1826-1894) was a pioneer and transnational activist who made a significant contribution to abolishing slavery in the US and paved the way for women to become public speakers and medical doctors.
Born to a family of free Black Americans in Massachusetts, who combined activism and entrepreneurship, Remond’s parents and siblings campaigned for racial integration and provided Salem with fancy cakes and wigs. Meanwhile, their home was a resting place on the underground railroad for people escaping slavery and journeying toward freedom.
Two years after a successful antislavery tour of the US, Remond sailed for England in December 1858 onboard the ocean steamer Arabia. Remond, who identified with the ultra-abolitionists but represented no agency, had “an intense desire to visit England” so she could “enjoy freedom” and “serve the antislavery cause”. (Derbyshire Courier, 13 April 1861.)
Remond arrived in Liverpool where she immediately started addressing crowded audiences. Soon she was instigating the formation of antislavery societies, including one in Warrington. Her talks were eloquent and powerful, her arguments well-sustained and persuasive; she was calm and self-possessed with a clear, musical voice. Remond’s audiences were rapt, greeting her with great applause and interrupting her with loud cheers.
In September 1859, after addressing several meetings in Liverpool and London, Remond arrived in Manchester, where her lectures generated such excitement that all the seats were quickly occupied, leaving hundreds outside the Athenaeum.
The mayor, Ivie Mackie, introduced “Miss Remond”, who gave an outline of slavery in the US and read passages from laws that made it illegal to teach an enslaved person to read.
Referring to her experience in England, Remond noted that an antislavery sentiment needed to be awakened in Manchester because, as in Liverpool, she “had found something that approximated more to the pro-slavery spirit of America”. (Leeds Mercury, 24 December 1859.)
She said: “When I walk through the streets of Manchester and meet load after load of cotton, I think of those 80,000 cotton plantations on which was grown the $125m worth of cotton which supplies your market, and I remember that not one cent of that money ever reached the hands of the labourers.”
Remond argued that US slavery rested on the constitution, and the slave trade had revived after England discontinued the searching of suspected ships and traders. She accused the press of being universally servile, suggested American politics had sunk to degradation, maintained that religious organisations supported slavery, and exposed the Wesleyan conference, recently held in Manchester, which had declined to accept an appeal prepared by the Leeds Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Association. The audience responded with frequent cries of “shame”.
Remond pointed out: “The slaves are essentially things, with no rights, political, social, domestic or religious, the absolute victims of all but irresponsible power.” She appealed to her audiences for their sympathy and influence: “Give us the power of your public opinion – it has great weight in America. Words spoken here are read there as no words written in America are read.” (Manchester Weekly Times, 17 September 1859; Nonconformist, 21 September 1859.)
Resolutions were made at the end of these meetings to deplore slavery and spare no effort to end it. (Nonconformist, 21 September 1859.)
No mention of Remond’s lectures appeared in the Manchester Guardian.

Eric Williams (1911-1981) was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, to a Black civil servant father and a mother of mixed heritage. He had a typical Caribbean colonial education steeped in British traditions. At the celebrated Queen’s Royal college, he excelled in sport and scholarship, rising to win an all-island grant to study at Oxford University in 1932. He spent the next six years there, reading history and completing a doctoral thesis on the “Economic Aspects of the Abolition of the Slave Trade and West Indian Slavery”. It was a courageous piece of scholarship. In 1930s Britain there had been a renewed celebration of William Wilberforce’s role in ending the British slave trade, and Williams introduced a different reading of the same history. The decisions to end both the slave trade and slavery, he argued, were driven more profoundly by economic concerns. As Caribbean sugar production declined, and the rise of industrialisation had been forecast, the crop’s profitability looked less assured. And the moral argument was secondary to larger concerns of profit and calculations of trade. That Williams was able to submit his thesis in this environment indicated a boldness and self-confidence that would define him.
In 1944 the thesis became Capitalism and Slavery, an entirely new vision of history-writing on slavery. Williams identified Manchester in particular as receiving a “double stimulus” from slavery: its businesspeople provided the goods to be traded on the African coast, and they benefited from the raw materials such as cotton that were dependent on slave labour. “The West Indies,” he argued, “had built up Manchester in the 18th century.” Capitalism and Slavery has generated enduring discussion on the economic forces that built, and centuries later demolished, racial slavery.
Williams’s own journey took new directions in the 1940s. He became a professor at Howard University in Washington DC, leaving this role in 1948, but over the years his innate anticolonialism and commitment to Caribbean reform deepened, and he became fully devoted to the project of Trinidadian independence. In speech and in writing Williams presented himself as a new-era politician. With large support, he formed the People’s National Movement in 1956 and won successive national elections until his death.
As prime minister, Williams took Trinidad to full independence on 31 August 1962, and 11 years later he signed the treaty of Chaguaramas, which established the Caribbean Community (Caricom). These achievements confirmed Williams’s position as “father of the nation”.
His later books were criticised by historians for lack of rigour and an apparent vainglory. And Caribbean radicals claimed he had moved far from the socialism that informed Capitalism and Slavery. But four decades after his death he continues to hold relevance for his extraordinary achievements as a historian and history-maker.

Kath Locke (1928–1992) was a Black working-class woman, born in Moss Side, Manchester to an English mother from Lancashire. She was actively involved in struggles for equality for more than 40 years.
During her childhood days in the 1930s many sailors from west Africa and the Caribbean lived in Cheetham Hill or in Salford, close to the docks.
She described her Nigerian father “as a politician of sorts. In our house, I remember seeing Jomo Kenyatta and Nkrumah. The pan-African movement met in our house, but as girls our interest was not readily encouraged.” The 1945 Pan-African Congress was held at the Chorlton-upon-Medlock town hall in Manchester. The organisers and participants included Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah, the future presidents of Kenya and Ghana. In the 1980s Locke, along with other pan-Africanists from across Britain, led a successful campaign to place a plaque on the wall of Manchester Polytechnic’s arts and humanities building in commemoration of that 1945 gathering.
Although her father did not actively encourage his daughters, Locke and her sisters Ada and Coco were committed activists. All three were involved in the development of the Black Women’s Co-operative, established to boost educational and employment opportunities for Black women and in particular young mothers.
Locke also played a significant role in the emergence of the Abasindi Co-op, enabling its women to realise, in the words of Audre Lorde, that “when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.” Locke committed to speak out on behalf of African and African-Caribbean women and children, especially those faced with deportation. She maintained that it was up to us individually and collectively to choose to be part of the problem or part of the solution.