Bury the Chains
This weekend marked the 224th anniversary of when a recent college student, Thomas Clarkson, and eleven other concerned citizens convened the first meeting to organize what is seen as the first modern human rights campaign: to abolish the British slave trade.
They pioneered techniques that groups like GI-NET/SDC still use today, such as media campaigns, mass meetings and petitions. Large numbers of British citizens raised their voices against the slave trade. Many of them stopped taking sugar in their tea, boycotting the sweet substance they loved so much because it was produced by slave labor. One of the movement’s petitions to parliament garnered 750,000 signatures. Given the population of Britain then, that would be the equivalent of 20 million signatures on a petition in the U.S. today!
This is an incredibly uplifting story, one that for me is a constant inspiration. But we need to highlight a couple of things about it that we must keep in mind. First, it took 20 years from that initial meeting over the printer’s shop in 1787 to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 – twenty years of struggle and effort, of small successes and many setbacks. Second, and equally sobering, the law in 1807 only ended the transport of slaves in the British Empire. It did not free a single slave in the British colonies, much less anywhere else in the world. Abolishing the slave trade was a remarkable achievement, and well worth the two decades of work, but even that was not the end of the struggle and we know today the fight may be even greater.
In 1828, in response to some new horror from the West Indies in the treatment of slaves, Thomas Clarkson’s brother John lamented, “It is dreadful to think, after my brother and his friends have been laboring for 40 years, that such things should still be.” Forty years of struggle – and still the ultimate goal was not reached. How tempting all along the way it must have been to give up, to say “this is too hard, the way is too long.” And no doubt some did. Others of course passed on. But a new generation stepped forward to continue the fight.
Finally, on August 1, 1838 – 51 years after the meeting in the printers shop – slaves in the British Empire were emancipated. Of the twelve who’d launched the struggle in that printers shop, all had died, save only Clarkson. And still, of course, the struggle was not over. Though the slaves in the British Empire were free, there still was slavery in the United States, Brazil and elsewhere in the world. It was left to others to carry on. In 1846, the American abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass came to see the 86-year-old Clarkson. Clarkson told the Americans that “he had spent sixty years in the struggle, ‘and if I had sixty years more they should all be given to the same cause.’”
I am sharing this with you today because it is a reminder that while our work is difficult, there are others who have attempted seemingly insurmountable feats and accomplished them. Advancing social justice takes time but we are future to stand on the shoulders of those before us and, with our efforts, others will stand on ours.
