Let My People Go

Friday 23 February 9.30am - 4.30pm, KC Stadium, Hull. Conference: “Let My People Go—contemporary issues on slavery and justice”. Information, inspiration and practical ideas from major speakers and local grassroots action on the range of issues that still remain 200 years after the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Keynote Speakers: Archbishop Sentamu, Fr Shay Cullen, Revd Dr Carrie Pemberton and Richard Reddie.

William Wilberforce (1759—1833) is remembered as the man who fought for the Act of Parliament that abolished the slave trade in the British Empire, 200 years ago in 1807. In the Diocese of York we have more reason to celebrate his life and consider his achievements, for Wilberforce was born in Hull and became the Member of Parliament for Hull and Yorkshire. His deeds sprang from the Christian faith he found while representing Hull.

Wilberforce and the Misery Trade

Men, women and children were rounded up in Africa, packed like luggage and shipped to the Americas alive or dead, for the survivors to be sold into a life of slave labour.

The English slave trade began in the 1560s and lasted for two and a half centuries.

Between ten and twelve million Africans were abducted and transported. Up to 15% did not survive the brutal conditions on the ships.

The Church was often complicit in what was being done. The Bible was cited in support of the trade. Africans were the descendants of Cain, destined to suffer—or they were being taken to America to be ‘civilised’. Often they were taught that they were destined to enslavement in this world in order to ‘earn’ their reward in the next.

But in the second half of the eighteenth century, a sense of rage began to develop in the church and outside it. In 1772 slavery was made illegal in England and Wales, and Scotland followed in 1778—but the trade in human misery continued (out of sight from home) between the British Empire and America.

William Wilberforce was elected Member of Parliament for his home city of Hull in 1780 and for Hull and Yorkshire in 1784. In 1784 he became a Christian, and following an historic meeting with leading Abolitionist Thomas Clarkson in 1787 (and with the support of his friend and former Prime Minister William Pitt the younger) Wilberforce put annual anti-slavery motions to the House of Commons for 18 years.

The passing of Wilberforce’s Bill on the 25th March 1807 marked the major turning point in the abolition of legalised slavery and slave trading in the British Empire, and so across much of the world.

But it was not the end of the story. The condition of slavery remained legal in the rest of the Empire until just after Wilberforce’s death in 1833, and until the 1860s in the United States.

We commemorate William Wilberforce as a visionary and determined Christian whose persistence in the face of evil - an evil supported by the state and parts of the church itself - saw the tide turn against legal slavery.

The story still isn’t over. There are still many cases and places in our own world where people’s lives are not their own.

As we give thanks for the great work of William Wilberforce two centuries ago, can we turn our back on those whose liberty has been snuffed out today?