The International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, England, is honoring its 10th anniversary with a new exhibit that tells slaves’ personal stories and explores the impact of abolition.
The exhibit, called “Ink and Blood: Stories of Abolition,” explains the plight of people affected by the end of slavery and later on, freedom. It tells those stories using documents from well-known museums in Britain as well as rare items from the Anti-Slavery International Library and by way of a nearly $300,000 grant the museum received from the Heritage Lottery Fund.
International Slavery Museum
It’s a chance to see abolition through ink (paper) and blood (the people), according to the museum’s website.
A bust of Olaudah Equiano, a freed African slave, author and abolitionist, is among the exhibit’s highlights. Equiano, later called Gustavus Vassa, was kidnapped from what is now Nigeria when he was 11, sold to a Virginia planter, bought by a British naval officer and finally sold to a Quaker merchant, according to the National Archives of the United Kingdom government.
After purchasing his freedom and moving to Britain, Equiano made it his mission to give lectures around the country that focused on his life as a slave, his kidnapping from Africa and the horrors of slavery.
Other high points in the exhibit are a plantation stock book listing an inventory of slaves and animals at the Roslin Castle Estate in Jamaica and a photograph of coffee pickers in Guadeloupe.
The museum opened its doors Aug. 23, 2007 — 200 years and five months after the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act outlawed the transatlantic slave trade in the British colonies. Even so, slave trafficking continued in the Caribbean until 1811.
The exhibit opened Aug. 21 and runs through April 8, 2018.