Remembering Slavery and Abolition in Bristol

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Remembering Slavery and Abolition in BristolMadge Dresser F.R.Hist.S. aa Department of History , University of the West of England , Bristol, UKPublished online: 01 May 2009.

To cite this article: Madge Dresser F.R.Hist.S. (2009) Remembering Slavery and Abolition in Bristol, Slavery & Abolition: AJournal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, 30:2, 223-246, DOI: 10.1080/01440390902818955

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Remembering Slavery and Abolitionin Bristol

Madge Dresser

This article charts how the public commemoration of slavery and abolition in the former

slaving port of Bristol, England, evolved from the late nineteenth century to the bicenten-

nial of the abolition of the British slave trade in 2007. It argues that by the late twentieth

century, demographic changes in the city and the explosion in slavery scholarship helped to

destabilise the consensus about how the city’s slaving past should be characterised. It cri-

tically examines the different constituencies within the city who responded in a variety of

ways to official calls to mark ‘Abolition 200’.

‘Every Bristolian,’ wrote a local columnist in 1907, is proud of his city and properly so,

for unlike industrial cities such as Manchester, ‘Bristol is no mushroom city. It has a

history.’1 Yet in truth, there are different ways of representing that history, especially

when it comes to slavery. Building on some of the insights afforded by recent work

on public memory and my own personal involvement as an historian in the city

since the 1970s, this article attempts to historicise some of the longstanding tensions

simmering between Bristol’s sense of civic pride and an acknowledgement of its role in

the Atlantic slave system.2 More specifically, it considers how the centenary and bicen-

tenary of the abolition of the slave trade were publicly represented in the city. Focusing

on ‘Abolition 200’ (as the bicentenary of the formal abolition of the British slave trade

in 2007 came to be ‘branded’), it seeks to set such representations of the city’s past in a

wider historical context and to document the relationship between academic history,

popular memory and public commemoration in the city.

Slavery and Abolition

Vol. 30, No. 2, June 2009, pp. 223–246

Madge Dresser, F.R.Hist.S., is a Reader in History at the University of the West of England at Bristol. Her

publications include Slavery Obscured (2001, reprinted 2007) a book on Bristol and the transatlantic slave

trade, ‘Statues and Slavery in London’ (History Workshop Journal, October 2007) and Bristol: Ethnic Minorities

and the City, c.1000–2001 (2007), co-authored with Peter Fleming. Correspondence to: Department of

History, University of the West of England, St Matthias Campus, Oldbury Court Road, Bristol BS16 2JP, UK.

E-mail: [email protected]

ISSN 0144-039X print/1743-9523 online/09/020223–24DOI: 10.1080/01440390902818955 # 2009 Taylor & Francis

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Bristol, Colston and the remembrance of slavery

The public remembrance of slavery in Bristol is uniquely informed by its ‘cult’ of

Colston. Edward Colston (1636–1721), whose statue presides over the city centre,

was a merchant and great patron of many Bristol churches and charities3 (Figures 1

Figure 1. The Colston Statue. The statue of the Bristol-born merchant Edward Colston

(1636–1721) stands in Bristol city centre and was erected by public subscription in1895. Since the 1990s, it has become a focus for local tensions over the way Bristol’s

past involvement in the slave trade should be acknowledged. Colston himself was both

a generous local benefactor and a member of the Court of Assistants in the RoyalAfrican Company. He had a wide trading portfolio, which included investments in both

a local sugar-refinery and in Antigua. Photo: The Author.

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and 2). Since the late 1990s, when Colston’s involvement in the slave trade became

more widely known (he was on the management board of the Royal African

Company and had investments in slave-produced sugar), his statue has become a

symbolic lightening rod for highly charged attitudes about race, history and public

memory. The statue has been defaced, and his name reviled, yet he still inspires

loyalty and pride amongst many Bristolians. His birthday remains, at the time of

writing, the occasion for civic ritual, and flowers are still laid on his tomb.4

There have been a series of stormy debates in the local media not only about the

statue itself, but about the future of Colston Hall and the proposed re-naming of the

central shopping area, traditionally known as Broadmead, as ‘Merchants Quarters’.

Such debates raged with particular gusto in the run-up to the bicentenary year. In

Figure 2. Plaque on the Colston Statue. The plaque attests to Colston’s virtues and phi-

lanthropy, but makes no mention of his involvement in the slave trade or slave-produced

goods. Photo: The Author.

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their wake, old certainties were overturned, and new questions raised not only about

the city’s slaving past, but about civic identity and the future nature of British

society.5

Colston alone has not shaped Bristol’s attitudes to its slaving past. Bristol was the

nation’s leading slaving port in the 1720s and even after it was eclipsed by Liverpool,

it remained an important hub for the trade in and the processing of slave-produced

goods. The city’s involvement with the Atlantic slave system continued for well over

a century after Colston’s death. Its continuing reliance on slave-produced tobacco

and cotton from America until 1865, and its enduring commercial and familial

links with the Caribbean, America and West Africa, ensured that public engagement

with issues around both slavery and race would continue to have a particular reson-

ance in the city.6

A ‘Liberal/Radical’ discourse about slavery can nevertheless be discerned in certain

sections of the local press and in some historical accounts from the Victorian period.

This co-existed and sometimes overlapped with a contrasting ‘Tory/Traditional’version, whose distinguishing feature was an artful distancing, if not outright

silence, on the matter of slavery and Bristol’s past involvement in it. Such silence

was usually accompanied by a celebration of Bristol’s mercantile traditions. The

latter discourse in particular was underpinned by an imperialist worldview whose

implicitly racialist assumptions occasionally found explicit and rabid expression, for

example, in the local press response to the Morant Bay uprising of 1865.7 By the

end of the century, Bristol’s most distinguished chronicler, John Latimer, represented

an amalgam of the two approaches, acknowledging and documenting Bristol mer-

chants’ involvement in slavery, but in a way that discouraged any discussion of its

longer-term legacy.8

The commemoration of abolition and emancipation in Bristol

In 1907, the centenary of the abolition of the British slave trade, Bristol perhaps had

more reason than most port cities for avoiding any embarrassing references to the

past. Cane sugar (once the city’s largest industry) was still processed, and bananas

from Jamaica had recently begun to be imported through the Avonmouth Docks,

along with the occasional ‘negro’ stowaway.9 By 1907, Bristol’s elite thus seemed

far more preoccupied with promoting trade with the Caribbean, and any allusions

to the slave trade in the official literature treated it as a historical curiosity firmly

fixed in the past. As John Oldfield concluded, the centenary of the abolition of the

British slave trade does not seem to have been much celebrated either in London

or Bristol.10 An arch reference made to ‘The slave question’ by the Tory Bristol

Magpie magazine in March 1907 might have been an obliquely barbed allusion to

the centenary, but was more explicitly concerned with the issue of South African

Chinese slavery than with 1807. Yet its racist rhetoric and its expressed resentment

about what it saw as an undue concern with the fate of people of colour at the

expense of the position of whites suggests much about local perceptions about

slavery, race and ‘The Other’:

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The Chink on the Rand, so peculiar and blandAroused our profound indignationAt the Hebrides nigger we cheerfully snigger,And feel not the least perturbation.11

John Latimer himself apparently authored the official Bristol guide of 1907,

published in 1908 ‘with the authority of the Lord Mayor and Corporation of

the city and county of Bristol’. The Lord Mayor of the day was Edward Burnet

James, a Conservative tobacco manufacturer, a partner in the firm Edwards, Ringer

& Bigg (which later became part of W.D. & H.O. Wills). The guide does include a

few descriptive paragraphs mentioning that Bristol was a slaving port, but these co-

exist with hagiographic references to Colston, including pictures of the plaques on

the base of the statue and a reproduction of the Bristol artist, Richard Jeffery’s

Lewis’s painting of Colston attended on his death bed by an adoring black female

servant.12

Race, slavery and commemoration

Interestingly, by the time the 1934 edition of the official guide to Bristol was published,

in the year of the centenary of the implementation of the Slave Emancipation Act, all

reference to Colston had been dropped. This might have had something to do with the

publication in 1920 of a life of Colston by the Reverend H. J. Wilkins, which had docu-

mented Colston’s role as a member of the Court of Assistants of the Royal African

Company. However, if the cult of Colston no longer appeared in the official guides,

it still featured in such civic celebrations as Colston Day and co-existed alongside

an unselfconscious celebration of the British imperial mission and Bristol’s role in

it. An editorial in the Bristol Evening Post on 31 July 1934 praises the work of

Wilberforce and Buxton to end slavery in Britain, but avoids any focus on Bristol’s

role in the slave trade. That same year saw a local Catholic College, St Brendan’s,

publish J. B. Thompson’s Slaves for Bristol, a bizarre reworking of Shakespeare’s

The Tempest, which for all its antislavery sentiments was shot throughout with racialist

characterisations.13 Imperialist and racialist assumptions continued to inform

Bristolian popular culture in the interwar period. C. M MacInnes, a Bristol University

academic, whose Bristol: A Gateway to Empire (and his more general work on

slavery) shared many of those imperialist assumptions, was nonetheless the first

academic actually to write on Bristol and the slave trade in sustained and documented

detail.14

During the Second World War, popular memory about slavery was transformed

by a novel entitled The Sun is My Undoing. This was the first volume in a trilogy

by Marguerite Steen, a Liverpool-born novelist. The book went through no less

than 16 editions in the 1940s and though now out of print, was immensely popular

in its day, both locally and nationally.15 Set in Bristol, this book traces the lives and

fortunes of the Floods, a local family involved in the slave trade. It also looks at

those whom the Floods had enslaved in both Africa and the Caribbean. The book is

based on an impressive grasp of the subject, leading one to speculate that Steen may


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well have had access to private papers of a slaving family. If her observations seem to

postmodern eyes still tinged with racialist assumptions, they were nonetheless surpris-

ingly nuanced. Steen’s willingness to confront with such a shrewd and unflinching eye

the realities of interracial sexual relationships, commercial corruption and the brutal-

ising influence of slavery earned her the unqualified admiration of many Bristol

readers. The book was also praised by none other than the Marxist historian and

Caribbean politician, Eric Williams, who pronounced her novel superior to academic

histories of British slavery.16 Yet the areas of discussion Steen opened up to popular

consideration in Bristol were soon foreclosed by the racial anxieties postwar immigra-

tion began to occasion.

The prelude to 2007

This reluctance to discuss slavery was in part generational, in part political; roughly

replicating the Tory/Radical divide of the century before. This division, always

blurred in practice, was in any case in the process of being undermined from the

1960s as a new cohort of British-born young people of African-Caribbean descent,

and a stream of (largely white) professionals and students came to live in the city.

This first group, who were particularly ill-served by the county’s educational and

police services, suffered from highly disproportionate rates of unemployment and

deprivation. By the 1980s, the St Paul’s ‘riot’ in Bristol and other race-related disturb-

ances in Britain’s inner cities made an open discussion of ‘race’ and slavery more highly

charged than ever.17 Visitors to Bristol found little mention of the city’s status as a

slaving port in official literature and a defensiveness on the part of locals about it.

Within the local African-Caribbean population and more liberal elements within

the majority community grew the conviction that Bristol’s racial tensions owed some-

thing to its past connections with slavery and a perception that ‘the city’ was uniformly

unwilling to ‘own up’ about its past.

We do not yet know how the establishment of a race relations unit at the

University of Bristol, the growth of Social Science and Humanities degrees at

Bristol Polytechnic and local adult education groups such as the Folk House and

the Workers Educational Association, with the spread of mass higher education

more generally, affected attitudes toward race. However, the proliferation of semi-

nars, talks and publications on race and slavery in Bristol from the late 1960s argu-

ably reinforced a more liberal and critical ‘counterculture’ among particular sections

of the population.18

The other area that merits future consideration is the impact of a more mobile and

globalised society on older established local identities. It is beyond the scope of this

study to treat on this point in any detail, but as London firms relocated to Bristol

as neighbourhoods were refashioned by postwar development and migration and as

popular culture became less provincial, being ‘Bristolian’ became a more complicated

affair.19 A recent ESRC research project on social cohesion, based in part on evidence

gathered from Bristol residents, concluded that the identities of locally born people

were ‘multiple and contingent’, that racial divisions were no longer ‘fixed by a

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black-white binary’ and that ‘culture [was] as important as skin colour in racializing

discourse’.20

It is arguable too, that more recent incomers felt less defensive about Bristol’s slaving

past than did those with more established roots in the city. Anecdotal evidence

suggests, for example, that the proportion of Bristol Merchant Venturers who were

directly descended from the city’s eighteenth-century merchants steeply declined in

the 1970s and this may partly account for the society’s later decision to put its archives

(which clearly document its central role in the slave trade) on open view in the City

Record Office. The very fact the society was persuaded to do this was also in part

due to the groundbreaking new scholarship on Bristol’s role in the Atlantic slave

economy which burgeoned from the 1980s. Pioneered by the economic historian

David Richardson, with his magisterial work on Bristol slave ships, and later augmen-

ted by Kenneth Morgan’s analyses of Bristol’s involvement in the Atlantic economy,

such work clearly documented with unprecedented precision the centrality of

slavery to the city’s prosperity. Local work on the African presence in eighteenth-

century Bristol also added to a more rounded view of the city’s past. These publi-

cations gave intellectual ammunition to those wishing to contest an uncritically

celebratory view of Bristol’s history.21

Thus when in the 1990s two public commemorative occasions in Bristol – the

International Festival of the Sea (1996) and the five hundredth anniversary of

Cabot’s ‘discovery’ of Newfoundland (1997) – still seemed to ignore the slave

trade’s importance to the city, such silence elicited organised protest. A Bristol

Slave-trade Action Group was formed in 1996 out of an alliance of a small multiracial

coterie of activists, city councillors and academics.22 The group co-opted into its ranks

Stephen Price, then the relatively new director of the City’s Museum and Art Gallery,

and sympathetic museum staff and other council officials later joined him. Their

actions make clear that a reified view of local officialdom as a fixed and unchanging

monolith was an oversimplification, yet even at this stage more defensive attitudes

still persisted within the local authority. There was no slavery memorial in the city

until the end of 1997 (deemed ‘the European year against racism’) when a small

plaque honouring the memory of enslaved Africans was placed in the city docks.

This was paid for by Bristol MEP Ian White and dedicated by former Colston

Schoolgirl-turned-novelist Philippa Gregory.

The museum, for its part, persevered with a plan to expand its coverage of Bristol’s

involvement in the Atlantic slave economy. In 1998, it published a popular ‘slavery

trail’ and pioneered an unprecedented degree of public consultation in preparation

for a large temporary exhibition 1999.23 The controversial nature of this exercise

was evident to those of us involved in its planning. There was a marked defensiveness

about the project from elements within the majority population, which was hardly

mitigated when in 1998, on the evening after Colston’s slaving activities had been

discussed at a public consultation organised by the Museum in St Paul’s, an obscenity

was painted on Colston’s statue.24

Nevertheless, the exhibition ‘A Respectable Trade? Bristol and Transatlantic Slavery’

(named after Philippa Gregory’s recent book and television series on the subject25)


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opened in March 1999, and that same month the City Council named a new ped-

estrian bridge in the city docks ‘Pero’s Bridge’ after an enslaved African who had

lived in Georgian Bristol as the servant of John Pinney, a former Caribbean planter

and erstwhile Mayor of Bristol. Pero’s story had only recently come to light thanks

to a small new display in Pinney’s former residence (‘The Georgian House’), which

had been researched by amateur activist historians and installed by the museum

service.26 The fact that Paul Boateng, MP (and a former defence lawyer for one of

the defendants in the 1980 St Paul’s disturbances) was invited to open the bridge

and visit the exhibition signalled the success of New Labour elements in determining

Bristol’s cultural agenda. The bridge has been doggedly referred to by many locals as

the ‘horned bridge’ rather than ‘Pero’s Bridge’, suggesting an undercurrent of resistance

to this agenda.

During its six-month run, nonetheless, the exhibition itself attracted over 160,000

visitors. This was an unprecedented number, which represented an increase of 79 per

cent over usual visitor levels.27 An expanded catalogue of the exhibition was published

in 2000, and a small remnant of the exhibition remained in the city’s industrial museum

until 2007. Most of the artefacts from the original exhibition were photographed

and preserved for posterity alongwith awide-ranging collection of digitised documents

from the Bristol Record Office in a new nationally funded website. The Port

Cities website, financed by the New Opportunities Fund, featured Bristol alongside

including sister websites about London, Liverpool (both major slaving ports) as well

Southampton and Hartlepool.28 However, the commitment of even progressive

elements in the city to representing the historic role of slavery in the city was dependent

on decidedly short-term funding, such as that offered by the New Opportunity Fund.

Expressions of ambivalence about the stress on slaving history also began to emerge

from some local African-Caribbean parents who feared that it was simply reinforcing

negative stereotypes about black victimhood. The thirst for positive black role models

for their children led to a call for a historiography that focused on African achievement

and agency. At its most positive this would prove to be a useful challenge to the

Eurocentrism of conventional historiography, but it could also foster an uncritically

celebratory and even racially essentialist approach to the interpretation of the past.29

‘Abolition 200’ in Bristol

In contrast to 1907, the bicentenary of the Abolition Act was widely commemorated

throughout Britain. Though no government monies were expressly dedicated to the

commemorations as they had been for other projects, such as the £60 million report-

edly devoted to the official commemoration of the Second World War, monies were

made available via the Heritage Lottery Fund, which contributed £14 million to the

proceedings. Some £2 million of this went to Bristol.30

There was clearly some internal wrangling over the amount of support central gov-

ernment was to have devoted to ‘Abolition 200’. Precisely why they ultimately decided

to underwrite the programme will be a matter for debate for some time to come. Yet

leaving aside the purity of their motives, the leadership shown by Deputy Party Leader

230 Madge Dresser

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John Prescott along with Baroness Amos and David Lammy was crucial to what was,

when all has been said and done, a profound change in what we might term the ‘official

priorities of remembrance’.

Prescott originally envisaged Hull, Liverpool, London and Bristol as the port cities

that should spearhead commemorations and began meeting with Bristol people to this

end in 2005. If London’s Mayor’s Office was wary about taking part, Bristol, which had

high hopes of beating Liverpool to become the City of Culture for 2008, was keener to

show willing. Bristol was encouraged to bid for individual projects from the Heritage

Lottery Fund. This national initiative did encourage Bristol’s City Council to take the

bicentenary seriously. In the end, Bristol City authorities donated some £200,000 in

match funding as well as dedicating a management team to administer the local

programme. The figures vary somewhat between official reports, but it appears that

at least £150,000 of this was used to help fund 24 commemorative and educational

projects relating to black history in general and to abolition in particular, and that

in all some 100 officially sanctioned events attracting 200,000 people were staged

over the year.31

Neither central nor local government reports about the success of ‘Abolition 200’ in

Bristol were interested in addressing why the marking of the bicentenary should elicit

so much attention when the centenary had been virtually ignored, but a careful reading

of these reports suggest that anxieties about social alienation and a quest for ‘commu-

nity cohesion’ in the wake of continuing inequalities and resentments were an import-

ant impetus. There was a real divide between Liberal-Democrat and Labour

councillors, who broadly supported ‘Abolition 200’ and the Tory councillors, who

were much less enthusiastic. As the celebratory tone of these reports masks the very

real divisions that erupted over the way commemoration projects were implemented,

and even over the legitimacy of commemoration itself, the remit of the rest of this

article is to consider what factors made the bicentenary in Bristol at once so engaging

and so contested.

The changing context

It is plain that demographic, political and cultural factors overlapped to affect the way

the bicentenary was perceived at both national and local level. As we have seen, the

demographic profile of the city had altered noticeably since the war, but it was only

with the 2001 census that the city’s changing ethnic profile was officially documented.

The census estimated that around 4 per cent of the city was of African-Caribbean,

African or mixed African heritage origin.32 As we shall see, this constituency, which

was largely of Jamaican origin, did not automatically support the official bicentenary.

If some may have felt indifferent, uneasy or even ashamed about drawing public

attention to their origins as enslaved people, others wanted the injustice of slavery

acknowledged but were themselves divided over how this should best be done.

There was deep suspicion expressed in some quarters that the bicentenary of the abol-

ition of the slave trade would be misrepresented by official bodies and made into a

Eurocentric vehicle of self-congratulation. And it was precisely because the


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relationship of African-Caribbeans to slavery and its aftermath had been and contin-

ued to be intrinsically different from that of their white neighbours that the very pre-

sence of this group in the city destabilised established perceptions of civic history and

collective identity.33

That is not to say that interest in the subject of slavery was confined to the ‘black

community’. Though locally led by African-Caribbean organisations such the

Kuumba Arts Centre, the Malcolm X Centre and the Black Development Agency,

Black History Week programmes at the City Record Office and related initiatives at

the City Library attracted white audiences from the beginning of the millennium. In

2006, a (largely white) grassroots group called ‘Bristol Radical History Week’ staged

a well-attended series of talks and events on the subject of resistance and rebellion

in the Atlantic slave trade with special sessions on Bristol and the Revolutionary

Atlantic.34

An easily overlooked cultural factor that distinguished the bicentenary commem-

orations from the relative silence of 1907 was the explosion in slavery scholarship

since the 1990s. The existence of national and provincial studies of the British slave

trade and abolition was important because it provided the knowledge base necessary

to promote more popular public histories and commemorative events. A well-

informed article about Bristol and slavery in the New African magazine from 2006

attests to the growing importance of online history, citing BBC websites among its

sources.35 The ‘Abolition 200’ Committee also devoted funds to ensuring a new

popular history of Bristol’s slave trade was commissioned and that previous publi-

cations such as The Bristol Slavery Trail were reprinted.36

There certainly was a need to popularise this history and to embed it in the cur-

riculum. The Bristol Youth and Play Services noted in this regard that ‘while young

people were keen to share their history, they did not really know very much about

black history and in particular black history in Bristol’.37 The ‘Understanding

Slavery Initiative’, a partnership between the Bristol-based British Empire and

Commonwealth Museum, the National Maritime Museum, National Museums

Liverpool and the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, developed teaching

resources for the teaching of the history of slavery and its legacy, which it made

public in 2007.38

However, the Council had yet to convince its entire black constituency that com-

memorating past injustices was not calculated as a diversion from addressing

present-day ones. There was a marked reluctance on the part of some black

groups to associate publicly with ‘Abolition 200’. In October 2006, ‘Operation

Truth 2007’, a Bristol-based African-centric group held a public meeting in conjunc-

tion with the Black Development Agency and the Consortium of Black Groups in

Bristol. The meeting, which linked the issue of the bicentenary with the demand

for reparations, was reportedly attended by over 100 people and declared a policy

of non-compliance with the official commemoration plans. Their purpose was in

part to champion a particular view of the historical past in order to highlight

what they saw as the continuing legacy of slavery. For many if not most African-

Caribbean groups, slavery was not dead history, but a ‘live issue’, Racial

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discrimination was seen as a product of slavery that continued to exert a negative

effect on black achievement and identity in contemporary British society.39 Such

defiance must have caused real concern to the sections within Bristol City Council’s

‘Abolition 200’ Steering Group, for following Tony Blair’s expression of regret over

the slave trade in December 2006, the Lord Mayor, leading councillors and other

civic leaders assisted by the Black Churches Council, gathered in the following

month to sign a ‘declaration of regret’ over the slave-trade (Figure 3).40 The

Figure 3. The Declaration of Regret over Bristol’s Involvement in the Transatlantic Slave

Trade Signed by Bristol’s Lord Mayor Cllr Peter Abrahams and Other Civic Leaders in

2007. Courtesy of Bristol City Council.


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Council then linked the event to a ‘Year of Black Achievement’, which focused on

educational enrichment for ethnic minority groups.

While the Council oversaw the funding of several concerts, film showings and talks

that winter,41 the local press coverage unhelpfully focused on the question of should

or could the public apologise for the slave trade – a topic calculated to deflect atten-

tion away from the long-term legacy of the Atlantic slave trade and to raise the defen-

sive hackles of many whites. Throughout the year, the debate over the proper

remembrance of Colston rumbled on, and at one point in the spring, it was

rumoured that the guerrilla artist Banksy had been responsible for painting drops

of blood on the feet of the Colston statue.42 On the 24 March, Toyin Agbetu, the

charismatic founder of Ligali, a national African-Centrist campaigning group,43

who had originally helped to persuade Bristol groups to withdraw from the

Council programme, himself participated in a BBC regional television debate on

the question of apology. The following day, as Agbetu was famously disrupting the

service at Westminster Abbey, a group of some thirty black protestors from the

Bristol-based group ‘Operation Truth’ demonstrated outside the commemorative

service held at Bristol Cathedral. According to one of Operation Truth’s representa-

tives, Jendayi Serwah: ‘Abolition 200 is an affront to all people of African descent. It

is a propaganda tool where a revisionist history of African people is being promoted

which presents the oppressor in the role of liberator.’44 Though their call for a

boycott of the service was not wholly successful, it was noticeable that some 250

of the 850 invited guests did not attend.

Though they could not claim to represent the majority of Black Bristolians, Oper-

ation Truth’s critique of ‘Abolition 200’ as a ‘Wilberfarce’; their insistence that slavery,

far from being abolished, still continued in other forms to oppress those of African

descent; their distrust of the motives of local and central government; and their

stress on the agency and centrality of enslaved Africans to the discussion of the Atlantic

slave trade (or ‘Maafa’, as they term it) struck a chord with many.45 As one local

member of Bristol City’s consultative Race Forum had explained to officials as early

as 2005, she felt that her community was always ‘underrepresented in this kind of

[commemorative] project’ and ‘that the legacy of slavery needs to be addressed

before it is put on display as “history”’.46

Operation Truth capitalised on a more widespread feeling of alienation among

those of African descent, asserting that whites lacked the empathy or will to do

proper justice to the past (or as many put it, referring to Audre Lorde: ‘The

master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house’). In the cause of self-reliance,

Operation Truth also lobbied other black groups in Bristol and beyond not to apply

for funding from ‘Abolition 200’. They could see only cynicism and social control

motivating the government plans.47 As Hilary Banks of the Consortium of Black

Groups in Bristol put it, Bristol Council ‘would have us singing and dancing on the

ships’.48 They invoked the spectre of conspiracy to drive home the more plausible accu-

sation that government interest in the subject was but a short-term snare, asserting

that: ‘Just like the Crack cocaine in our community Abolition/Wilberfarce 200 is a

short term hit with a short term high!’49

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Of course, this characterisation of both local and central government as a monolith

of malign intent was at best an oversimplification. More progressive elements within

the Liberal Democrat and Labour elements on the Council had been consulting black

groups about the bicentenary at least as early as 2005, and certain individuals within

some local authority departments (including those working in the Museum, Library

Service, Record Office and Equalities units) had pressed for a meaningful engagement

with black history before that. However, such was the distrust of the City Council as a

whole that even the city-sponsored group the Bristol Black Archive Partnership (whose

aim was to have more African-Caribbean records preserved at the City Record Office)

at first distanced itself from ‘Abolition 200’ for fear of causing dissension within the

project and alienating their target groups.

In the end, however, though Operation Truth and its allies played a tactically useful

role in highlighting the deficiencies of the Council’s initial approach, it proved less

influential in urging cash-starved organisations to refuse funds for palpably worthy

projects. Their separatist stance did not seem to be representative of the African-

Caribbean population as a whole since such black-led groups as the Barbadian

Parents and Friends Association, Bristol Black Churches and Kuumba were among

those who applied for Council funds to stage events during the year. In addition, a

more recently formed consortium of African groups in Bristol under the aegis of ‘Afri-

cans in One’ had by then emerged, which displayed a more pragmatic and accommo-

dating approach towards ‘Abolition 200’.50 Yet it was precisely because Operation

Truth had polarised matters that the Council was forced to pay more serious attention

to meaningful consultation, and this in turn strengthened the hand of the majority of

the city’s black-led groups.51

More specifically, the Council responded to the threat of non-cooperation by

setting up a steering group and inviting interested black majority groups to meet

David Lammy, then Minister of Culture, when he visited Bristol in March.52

Advised by local campaigner Paul Stephenson and others willing to liaise with the

city, the campaign aimed to win the hearts and minds of the black population. As

the year progressed, banners featuring Olaudah Equiano were hung in the city

centre and as awards were made, more interest was generated. The Heritage

Lottery Fund awarded £770,000 to the British Empire and Commonwealth

Museum to stage ‘Breaking the Chains’, a temporary exhibition on abolition that

was opened by the Princess Royal in April 2007. Though the exhibition has been

the subject of some justified criticisms about the relationship between the academic

advisors and the curatorial team, the museum’s public consultation process and its

incorporation of exhibitions of local black artists had been ground breaking in its

inclusivity.53

The Bristol Black Archive Partnership, a consortium of municipal, grassroots and

academic organisations, received £50,000 from the Lottery to fund an outreach organ-

iser to collect and help disseminate historical materials about Bristol’s African-Carib-

bean community (Figure 4). The sum of £25,000 went to another such consortium for

the Adisa Project, which funded eight Bristol school pupils (of either African-Carib-

bean or mixed heritage) on a 16-day trip touring slavery-related sites in Ghana and


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involved some 22 pupils in producing a film and staging an exhibition at the City

Museum about the experience.

As the year unfolded, many more groups joined in a flurry of commemorative

events funded mainly by the Lottery or the City Council, many of which were

black-led or had a substantial black constituency. Some predominantly white-led

organisations (such as the city’s two universities and the major arts venues) were by

then anxious to be part of this groundswell, organising and financing their own

events.54 All in all, the list of events generated during the year was varied, ranging

from screenings of films as different in approach and style as Toyin Agbetu’s documen-

tary Maafa and the Bristol Film and Video Society’s more Eurocentric Clarkson in

Bristol, to the hosting of the replica ship Amistad whose international crew included

three Bristol students. Tony Benn joined a mainly African-Caribbean ceremony

honouring the local tomb of the enslaved servant Scipio Africanus.55 Talks included

the intellectually substantive series run by the Our History, Our Heritage Group

(Figure 5) and more populist events such as the immensely popular ‘Black Heroes

in the Hall of Fame’ production at Colston Hall. A series of events organised by the

group Africans in One represented a newer alliance of various African nationalities

Figure 4. Bristol Black Archive Calendar. The Heritage Lottery Fund financed this project,which was first suggested by Bristol’s civil rights campaigner Paul Stephenson. Organised

by a multiracial consortium of local institutions, voluntary groups and individuals, it pro-

duced a commemorative calendar in 2007, whose aim was to popularise Bristol’s BlackHistory. The calendar, which was distributed for free to schools and to the city’s

African-Caribbean community, proved hugely popular. Courtesy of Bristol City Record

Office.

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within the city willing to engage in the subject of slavery and popular memory

(Figure 6).56

Significantly, some white local history and family history groups also evinced an

interest in ‘Abolition 200’. Public speakers on slavery were much in demand

throughout the year, though the subject was treated as more as a historical curiosity

by some: ‘The society thanks Ms Dresser for a most illuminating talk [on “Bristol

and the slave-trade”] and looks forward to its next on the “History of the Privy”.’57

Given Bristol’s particular relationship with Colston, it is perhaps significant that

one of the most controversial commemorative events has not yet been realised at

time of writing in 2008. Still seeking top-up funding, the Two Coins Project

(Figure 7) is the vision of the artist Graeme Mortimer Evelyn whose aim is to

impose an installation around the Colston statue on Bristol’s city centre onto

which a silent subtitled film is to be projected. The already completed film is

about slavery in the past and present, and uses images from Bristol, West Africa

and the Caribbean. The original plan was to relocate the installation after six

weeks in Bristol to other key slavery-related statues in Barbados and Ghana, but

though initial development funding was provided by the Arts Council and Bristol

City Council, and though the project has attracted international interest, local

ire was aroused by the very idea of ‘covering up Colston’ and at time of writing

the city and other funding bodies seem increasingly skittish about implementing

the project.58

Figure 5. Poster of a Programme of Events organised by Our History Our Heritage, a

Black-led Bristol Group Promoting Historical Awareness in the BME and Wider Commu-

nity. Courtesy of ‘Our History Our Heritage’.


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For all the genuine interest ‘Abolition 200’ finally generated in Bristol, there were

complaints by the year’s end that the city was suffering from ‘slavery fatigue’. Some

residents were resentful that city monies had been spent on publicising this aspect of

Bristol’s past and about ‘being made to feel guilty’ about the slave trade.59 There has

been reaction, too, against the 2008 allocation of £250,000 to a Legacy project as a

three-year follow-up to ‘Abolition 200’. Spearheaded by veteran local activist Paul

Stephenson (who was also a moving force behind the Bristol Black Archives Partner-

ship), its stated aims are to ‘tackle inequalities in education, health and cultural

representation’ and ‘to promote inclusion and inter-cultural dialogue’.60 How much

the programme will utilise historical perspectives to address these issues remains to

be seen.

Figure 6. Poster of Events Organised by ‘Africans in One’, a Group containing African as

well as African-Caribbean Members. A debate on Colston, held at the Empire and Com-monwealth Museum, attracted several hundred people, mainly from the African and

African-Caribbean community. Courtesy of Africans in One.

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Conclusion

What difference did the public commemoration of slavery and abolitionmake to Bristol?

It is too soon to tell, but some preliminary observations on the project itself can bemade.

The weaknesses of ‘Abolition 200’ were partly ones of implementation – its processes

were bureaucratic and did not always successfully negotiate the conflicting needs for

Figure 7. The Two Coins Project. This project, led by artist Graeme Mortimer Evelyn,

produced a film featuring Bristol’s involvement in slavery both in the past and present-day. Morton also sought permission to erect a box around the Colston statue, onto

which the film was to have been projected. Courtesy of Graeme Mortimer Evelyn.


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accountability and accessibility. Short-term funding is an exhausting and demoralising

drain on struggling community groups and artists, and the scramble for limited funds

can foster community division rather than cohesion.

Conceptual fudges were also implicit in ‘Abolition 200’. There remain unresolved

tensions between the integrity of history as a discipline, and the need to create a

past with which all the city’s residents can collectively identify. The sensitivities of

those whose past has been traumatised, suppressed and submerged by slavery and

its legacy needed to be sensitively but honestly addressed and the media-generated

focus on apology was an unhelpful diversion. Yet for a programme intended to

promote debate, ‘Abolition 200’ sometimes foreclosed it. ‘Political correctness’ is a

term used by those who would discredit challenging inequality and privilege so it

seems invidious to invoke it here. Yet there was discernable in both the official dis-

course and in many of the more public discussions around slavery a tendency to

limit the terms in which the issues around race and slavery were discussed. Given

the highly charged atmosphere obtaining at the time, this was not surprising, but

such self-censorship hardly promoted nuanced arguments or a fully honest exchange

of views. As a result, the focus on racial injustice was popularly perceived by some as

excluding a due appreciation of historic injustices based on class. As one angry

opponent of a slavery monument in Bristol wrote:

FORGET a monument to the slave trade – what we want is a monument to theworking-class and its provision of cannon fodder for Ypres, Paschendale and theSomme, people such as my father, my father-in-law and my uncles who thoughtthey would come back to a land fit for heroes. But what a land. The heroes werethere but treated like rubbish by people who were not fit to clean their boots.And that’s before we get to the Second World War, where many of my boyhoodfriends and workmates died. It was they who built the prosperity of this city, notthe 300-year-old slave trade.61

The tendency to dismiss such anger simply as racist reaction or postcolonial tris-

tressemisses the point that such responses are also grounded in real feelings of disem-

powerment, exclusion and disadvantage. The white constituency critical of ‘Abolition

200’ must not be pandered to, but the concerns they raise need to be heard, especially

as the specifically racial anxieties that made the city’s slaving past so difficult to con-

front may be increasingly displaced by new anxieties about ethnicity, immigration,

religious extremism and an alienated underclass.62

The strengths of ‘Abolition 200’ were first that it forged a new relationship between

academic and public history, and second that it has helped to open out and inform

public understanding of the past. Many more Bristolians than before appreciate the

way that slave-generated wealth helped build the city they now enjoy. Arguably fewer

have been sensitised to slavery’s more insidious impact on those whose ancestors had

been enslaved, but the issues have at least been raised. The year also stimulated new

relationships and better communication between curators, librarians, archivists, aca-

demics, artists, community activists, teachers and academics. Academics for their part

have had their complacency challenged and their perspectives enriched by venturing

outside the academy. Importantly too, ‘Abolition 200’ gave crucial if temporary financial

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support to new talent. It provided a platform for black artists, affirmed the efforts of

long-serving and often under-funded community activists, and lifted the morale of

many whose experience had been unthinkingly discounted in the past.63 Imperfect as

it was, it promoted more reflection about whose history and whose city Bristol is.

Acknowledgments

This article builds on a paper delivered at the Remembering Slave Trade Abolitions

Conference convened by Newcastle University on 24 November 2007. Thanks to

Diana Paton, Jane Webster, Diana Jeater and Philip Ollerenshaw for their guidance

and support, and to Edson Burton, Dawn Dyer, Asif Khan, Katherine Prior, Sarwat

Siddiqui, Ros Martin, Paul Stephenson and Africans in One for kindly providing

me with relevant material and advice. I alone bear responsibility for the content

and arguments contained within this article.

Notes

[1] Anon., ‘Fifty Years in the Life of Bristol’.

[2] Nora, Realms of Memory, 1: ix–xiv, xv–xxiv, 1–20; Chivallon, ‘Bristol and the Eruption of

Memory’, 347–363; Kowaleski Wallace, British Slave Trade, esp. 25–66; Oldfield ‘Chords of

Freedom’, 1–6, 90–110.

[3] Dresser, ‘Colston’, 108; Morgan, Edward Colston.

[4] Flickr Blog/Brizzle Born and Bred: ‘The Most Hated Statue in Bristol?’ (7 December 2007) at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/2094281390/; Colston’s School: ‘Remem-

brance Service and Colston Day’, 9 November 2006, at: http://www.colstons.bristol.sch.uk/09-news/Nonuniformday9nov06.html; The Dolphin Society: ‘Aims of the Society’ at: http://www.dolphin-society.org.uk/aims.html/

[5] E.g., see Bristol Evening Post (England), 6 February and 9 April 1998; 11 and 16 April 2002; 18

and 22 November 2005; 5 and 16 April, 22 May, 30 August, 6, 7, 15 and 29 September 2007.

BBC Radio Bristol had phone-ins and features on the subject, and see BBC Bristol and BBC

News ‘Inside Out – West’, 31 January 2005, at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/west/series7/slavery.shtml; ‘The John Turner Phone-in’, BBC Radio Bristol, 31 May 2005 (recording

in the author’s possession). See also Chivallon, ‘Bristol and the Eruption of Memory’, 347–363;

Kowaleski Wallace, British Slave Trade, 43–65.

[6] Lynn, ‘From Sail to Steam’, 235–239, 243, points out the importance of the trade in (slave-

produced) palm oil trade from West Africa to Bristol in the nineteenth century. Sugar refining

by such firms as Fissels in the nineteenth century, and the continuing importance of the Wills

family to the city, illustrates the point. With reference to links to Jamaica, one of Bristol’s largest

building firms (W. Cowlins) employed ‘native labour’ in Jamaica on its contracts there as late as

the 1920s. Draper, ‘Possessing Slaves’, has recently shown the links between residents in Clifton,

Bristol, and the award of slave compensation, and I have documentation courtesy of Brian

Murphy that a former slave plantation retained both place name and familial links with

Bristol families up the 1950s.

[7] Anon., ‘Morant Bay’; Anon., ‘A Black Business in Jamaica’; Hall, Civilising Subjects, 420;

Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians, 163–211; Heuman, ’The Killing Time’.

[8] Latimer, Annals, 29, 188.

[9] See, e.g., the case of two young Jamaican stowaways to Bristol mentioned in The Horfield and

Bishopston Record, 30 March 1907, and reproduced in the ‘Bristol in 1807: A Sense of Place’

Exhibition at Bristol Central Reference Library, 2007–2008.


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[10] Western Daily Press, 2, 7 and 23 February, 1 May 1907. See the treatment of Bristol’s slave trade

in Anon., ‘History of the Borough’, 9–10. Weatherly, ‘Untitled poem’, celebrates Bristol.

[11] Anon., ‘The Slave Question’. The reference to the ‘Hebrides nigger’ concerns the desperate

conditions obtaining in the Hebrides, which saw mass emigration to Canada, America and

the Falklands at the turn of the century.

[12] Anon (1908), Official Guide, 28–29, 43, 88–87.

[13] Thompson, Slaves for Bristol, unpaginated.

[14] See Anon., ‘Bristol and the West African Slave Trade’, 12; Anon., ‘“Cradle of Empire” Pageant’,

125; MacInnes, Gateway of Empire; MacInnes, England and Slavery.

[15] Steen, The Sun is My Undoing, first published in 1941. The latest known edition is 1971.

[16] Williams, ‘Reviewed Work’, 525–526.

[17] Burton, ‘African-Caribbeans’, 149–151, 169; Dresser, ‘Ethnic Diversity’, 150.

[18] MacInnes, Bristol and the Slave-Trade, now included; Marshall, Anti-slave-trade Movement;

Marshall, Bristol and the Abolition of Slavery.

[19] Rattansi, ‘“Western” Racisms’, 27; Parekh, Future of Multi-ethnic Britain, 25–26.

[20] Clarke and Gardner, Mobility and Unsettlement.

[21] Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the Eighteenth-century Slave Trade; Richardson, Bristol Slave-

traders.

[22] Morgan, Bristol and the Atlantic Trade; Joseph and Jones, Black Population of Bristol.

[23] Dresser et al., SlaveTrade Trail. See also http://www.englandspastforeveryone.org.uk/Counties/Bristol/Projects/SlaveryTrail/SlaveryTrail?Session/@id=D_sU69gTHYe5iifCkrLQGq/

[24] The Times, 29 January 1998.

[25] Gregory, A Respectable Trade.

[26] Eickelmann and Small, Pero, 7.

[27] Bristol City Council/Libraries and Museums Panel, Agenda Item 5; Department of Culture,

Media and Sport/Museums and Galleries Division, Museums for the Many.

[28] Byrne, ‘Slaves to the Past’. Gregory’s 1998 novel A Respectable Trade was the basis for a BBC

drama series; Port Cities/Bristol, Bristol and Transatlantic Slavery; Bristol Evening Post, 31

January and 4 June 2005.

[29] These issues came out in a ‘Cultural Exchange’ panel with Yasmin Alibhai Brown, Tony Sewell

and Wendy Wente, organised by the Bristol City Council’s Equalities Unit, which I chaired in

October 2003. They were also expressed in subsequent public meetings (see Bristol Evening Post,

15 October 2005).

[30] Her Majesty’s Government, The Way Forward; Her Majesty’s Government, Understanding

Slavery. I am grateful to Asif Khan for information on the background to the funding process.

[31] For Prescott and Lammy’s involvement, see Bristol Evening Post, 29 November and 4 December

2005. For an overview of Abolition 200, see Her Majesty’s Government, The Way Forward;

Bristol City Council, Draft Legacy Report, Appendix 4, Abolition 200; Bristol City Council/Social Development Scrutiny Commission, Progress on Abolition 200.

[32] Bristol City Council, ‘Ethnic Group’ Census; Chivallon, ‘Bristol and the Eruption of Memory’,

351.

[33] Chivallon, ‘Bristol and the Eruption of Memory’, 352–358. See Note 5 above. A selection of

white attitudes to this history were also expressed in ‘The John Turner Phone-in’, BBC

Radio Bristol, 31 May 2005, and a racially mixed survey of selected schoolchildren indicates

widespread ignorance about black history, which did not seem to be restricted to white

children.

[34] BBC Bristol, Going Out: ‘Black History Week in Bristol’, 14 October 2003 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/bristol/content/goingout/2003/10/10/blackhistmonth.shtml); Bristol

Radical History/Archive/2006, “The Atlantic Slave Trade”; Bristol Radical History/Archive/2007, “Slavery”.

[35] Duodu, ‘Can Bristol City Conceal its Slave Past?’; Hill, ‘City Agonizes over Slavery’.

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[36] Jones, Satan’s Kingdom, along with other ‘unofficial’ variants of the slavery trail.

[37] Bristol City Council, Draft Legacy Report, Appendix 7, Abolition 200. This appendix contains

Departmental Responses.

[38] ‘Understanding Slavery Initiative’, 22 July 2007 (http://www.understandingslavery.com/aboutus/).

[39] Black Development Agency, Position Statement. Asif Khan, Interview, 25 February 2008,

also confirmed this as a view held by a significant section of local activists at the time

(see Note 42).

[40] ‘Statement of Regret in Abolition 200 – Bristol Commemoration’; Bristol Evening Post, 13

January 2007; Bristol City Council/Abolition 200-Bristol Commemoration, “Statement of

Regret”.

[41] For a full list of Council-sponsored events, see Bristol City Council,Draft Legacy Report, Appen-

dix 5, Abolition 200.

[42] Bristol Evening Post, 13 March 2007; BBC Bristol, Talk Bristol: ‘Have Your Say: Colston Hall’, 9

March 2007 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/bristol/content/articles/2007/03/09/colstonhall_na-me_feature.shtml); BBC Bristol, Abolition: ‘Is Bristol Racially Fractured?’, 26 July 2007

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/bristol/content/articles/2007/03/22/insideout_marvin_feature.shtml);

BBC Bristol, Entertainment/Community Events: ‘Debates over City’s Slavery Past’, 10 May 2006

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/bristol/content/articles/2006/05/03/slavery_debate_event_feature.shtml).

[43] ‘Ligali (pronounced lee-gar-lee) is the African British Equality Authority: ‘We are a Pan African

Human Rights Organisation that challenge the misrepresentation of African people and culture

in the British media’ (http://www.ligali.org/index.php); Ligali, ‘Position Statement on the Bi-

centenary of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Maafa)’ (http://www.ligali.org/truth2007/position.htm; and see Ligali: http://www.ligali.org/article.php?id¼471).

[44] Bristol Evening Post, 26 March 2007; Western Daily Press, 26 March 2007; The Bristol Blogger,

‘Whitewash?’ and ‘Addendum’, 26 March 2007 (http://thebristolblogger.wordpress.com/2007/03/26/whitewash-addendum/).

[45] ‘The Maafa translated into English means “The Enslavement of (Mama) Africa” . . . is derived

from a Kiswahili word meaning disaster, terrible occurrence or great tragedy. When capitalised

it refers to the oppression of African people murdered, raped and inhumanly enslaved by

invading Arabs and Europeans. The definition includes the subsequent subjugation,

contamination or loss of indigenous African cultures, languages, religions and encompasses

the historic and ongoing commercial exploitation of Africa’s human and natural resources

through enslavement, colonisation and neo-colonialism’ (http://www.ligali.org/terminology/terminology.php).

[46] Race Forum [Bristol], ‘Minutes’.

[47] Operation Truth 2007. ‘About Us’ (http://www.operationtruth2007.co.uk/index.htm).

[48] See the remarks of Hilary Banks of Bristol, Transcript of ‘Inside Africa: The Legacy of Slavery’,

aired 3 March 2007, 12:30 ET on CNN.

[49] Operation Truth 2007, ‘About Us’.

[50] Awards for All, African People to Give Their Take; BBC Bristol, Abolition: ‘Black Bristolians Give

Their Views’, 16 March 2007 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/bristol/content/articles/2007/03/16/descendants_feature.shtml).

[51] See the remarks of Hilary Banks of Bristol, Transcript of ‘Inside Africa: The Legacy of Slavery’,

aired 3 March 2007, 12:30 ET on CNN.

[52] Bristol Evening Post, 27 March 2007.

[53] See Prior, ‘Commemorating Slavery’, 200–211.

[54] For a full list of Council-sponsored events, see Bristol City Council,Draft Legacy Report, Appen-

dix 5, Abolition 200. For events at the universities, see University of Bristol, News/Press Release:‘Spotlight on the Slave-trade and its Aftermath’, 15 March 2007 (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/


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news/2007/5345.html); University of the West of England, Events at the Universities:

‘Abolition 200’ (http://info.uwe.ac.uk/news/UWENews/article.asp?item¼1021&year¼2007).

[55] For Scipio Africanus ceremony, see Bristol Evening Post, 13 October 2007.

[56] ‘Our History, Our Heritage’, Project Share 2008 (http://www.ourhistoryourheritage.org.uk/who.html); African Initiatives 2007 (http://www.african-initiatives.org.uk/media%20files/avoices%20final.pdf).

[57] Thornbury Local History and Archaeological Society, Slave-trade in Bristol.

[58] Bristol Evening Post, 30 August and 6 September 2007.

[59] Bristol 2007’s weblog, ‘The Aftermath – 200th Anniversary of “Abolition” of Slavery in British

Empire’ (http://bristol2007.wordpress.com/); Bristol City Council/Bristol Citizens’Panel

Reports, A Bristol Citizens’ Panel Survey.

[60] Bristol Evening Post, 7 and 11 January, and 12 April 2008; BBC News, ‘Legacy Commission Set

Up’, 13 April 2008 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bristol/7345084.stm).

[61] Bristol Evening Post, 2 February 2005.

[62] Bristol 2007’s weblog, ‘The Aftermath’.

[63] As a direct result of Abolition 200, Bristol City Council launched in April 2008 a £250,000

‘programme of work and initiatives to tackle inequalities in services, such as education and

young people; health and wellbeing and cultural representation amongst Bristol’s Black and

African-Caribbean communities’ and to promote intercultural dialogue. The Commission is

funded until 2010 (see Bristol City Council, Launch of Bristol’s Legacy Commission).

References

Anon. “Morant Bay.” Bristol Times and Mirror, 17 November 1865.

———. “A Black Business in Jamaica.” Western Daily Press, 13 November 1865.

———. “Fifty Years in the Life of Bristol.” Clifton and Redland Free Press, 2 August 1907.

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Documents

Remembering Slavery and Abolition in Bristol