As part of Black History Month 2016, the Citizenship ‘Race’ and Belonging Research Network hosted a public lecture on the history of Portsmouth’s black presence in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The talk, Black Preachers in Georgian Portsmouth by Dr Ryan Hanley, a Junior Research Fellow at New College, University of Oxford and was based in part on Ryan’s PhD research as well as new research using local archives and national databases such as the Legacies of British Slave Ownership database (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/). Ryan and I joined Mason Jordan on Express FM’s ‘Portsmouth Breakfast’ show on Monday morning to discuss both the Citizenship, ‘Race’ and Belonging Research Network and Ryan’s research.
Around 45 people came to hear Ryan’s lecture, which followed the experiences of three individuals of African descent whilst they were in Portsmouth. The first individual, James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (c.1705-1775), a freed slave whose autobiography is the first published by an African in Britain. Gronniosaw’s experience of Portsmouth was mixed: he was conned out of his savings by an unscrupulous pub landlady near the dockyard, but he also found a local advocate who tried to help him get his money back. The next individual is probably the better known of the three; the author and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745-1797). Equiano was still enslaved when he first came to Portsmouth, and while his attempts to escape into the city were ultimately dashed, he still saw the town as a potential beacon of freedom. Finally, Ryan discussed the experiences of a lesser known individual, John Jea (b.1773), a black African preacher who gave sermons to Portsmouth’s working class sailors and communities in Portsea, a mere few streets from where this lecture took place.
Ryan’s lecture made use of some fantastic local maps, which he obtained in digital form from the University of Portsmouth library (http://www.port.ac.uk/library/infores/maps/). These visual aids helped show just how ‘local’ this transatlantic black history is. As the ‘home of the Royal Navy’ and as an important commercial port at this time, many different people came to Portsmouth, to live, work, and indeed preach their faith. As Ryan argued, Portsmouth was important to Britain’s Black History because it was a naval port; the main reason black people came to Britain during this period was not slavery, but military service. Ryan’s talk illustrated the complexities of the imperial project in terms of the employment opportunities open to people of African descent in British ports at this time, but also the discrimination and mistreatment they faced.
Ryan’s talk is available as an MP3 download (below).
AUDIO: ‘Black Preachers in Georgian Portsmouth’ by Ryan Hanley
(To download the audio right click on the player above and select “save audio as…”)
You can find the Prezi for Ryan’s talk, with images and quotations, here. [http://prezi.com/1nhehz_yfc6k/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share]
About Ryan: Ryan Hanley is Salvesen Junior Fellow in History at New College Oxford. He is the author of several articles on black intellectuals in eighteenth-century Britain, and is co-editor, with Katie Donington and Jessica Moody, of Britain’s History and Memory of Transatlantic Slavery (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016). Ryan is currently working on a monograph on black writing in Britain between 1770 and 1830. His research also contributed to the project Our Migration Story: http://www.ourmigrationstory.org.uk/about.html
Articles/further reading:
Ryan Hanley, ‘“There to sing the song of Moses”: John Jea’s Methodism and Working-class Attitudes to Slavery in Liverpool and Portsmouth, 1801-1817’, in Katie Donington, Ryan Hanley and Jessica Moody (eds.), Britain’s Memory of Slavery: Local Nuances of a ‘National Sin’ (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016)
Ryan Hanley, ‘Calvinism, Proslavery and James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’, Slavery & Abolition, 36:2 (2015), 360-381.