This website is dedicated to the numerous African American freedom fighters who made radical, politicized and often perilous journeys across the Atlantic to educate and inform British/Irish audiences about white supremacy and US chattel slavery. It is designed to highlight their relentless speaking and literary tours, their immeasurable contributions to abolitionism and social justice, their professional and personal sacrifices, their successes, the barriers they faced (sometimes from white abolitionists among others), and most importantly, their lives as warriors for themselves and their families.
I’m currently based at the University of Edinburgh and have published books, articles, blog posts on this subject - but most importantly, I use this website and the maps to create public engagement and community work that involves in-person and online walking tours, talks, teaching resources, webinars for teachers, school workshops, performances, plays and the erection of heritage plaques. My ethos as a historian, as a researcher dedicated to racial and social justice, means that I am deeply committed to (re)cvoering African American abolitionist missions and I hope this particular project honours their lives and impact with respect, care and justice.
I have included short biographies of some of the activists I research, but there are many whose lives we know little about - Washington Duff, James C. Thompson for example - who may have spurned white western literary practices and refused to tell their stories through autobiographies. Excavating their lifestories from the speeches they gave involves numerous problems: the coverage of their lectures are framed through the gaze of white western newspaper correspondents and for many Black women, including Julia Jackson, their radical speeches on British soil have been violently erased by correspondents, too. While I try and excavate their lifestories by examining as many archival and historical material as possible, honouring their lives and lecturing tours is one way to visualize their extraordinary activism in Britain and Ireland. I hope the maps are one way of illustrating their social justice missions abroad.
Ultimately, this research is open access and first and foremost is designed for all - please email me if you’re an educator, or want to know more about mapping, individual activists or anything related. I can pass on transcribed speeches, bio data if I have it and much more.
I’m constantly learning and being inspired by the work of numerous DH scholars, including Vincent Brown, Kim Gallon, Brit Rusert. I’m so grateful to be working in this space.
This website started out as a Masters project for Royal Holloway, University of London. It snowballed into a PhD with the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham, which I completed in January 2018.
I am absolutely indebted to Dr. Mike Gardner at the University of Nottingham, for kindly building this website for me and introducing me to GitHub. Without his help, this website wouldn’t exist! Thanks also to Dr. Anouk Lang at the University of Edinburgh, who gave me some brilliant insight and pointed me towards Carto.
If you would like to learn more about the website, email me at: hannahrose.murray78@gmail.com
If you want to use the website in any form, please acknowledge the website as the source of the material. This is an educational, non-commercial project. I have referenced all scholarly work and the writings of Frederick Douglass, and copyright remains exclusively with them. The website and my own ideas are copyright: Hannah Murray 2022. All rights reserved.
Frederick Douglass as a younger man (Wikipedia)