The abolition of slavery

Bob Strong’s “What ended worldwide slavery?” (July 11) completely ignores the crucial role that people of color played in the abolition movement in Britain and the U.S. Black abolitionists such as Olaudah Equiano in Britain and Frederick Douglass in the U.S. worked side by side with white abolitionists such as William Wilberforce and William Lloyd Garrison in their countries’ respective abolitionist movements.

Mr. Strong also ignores the crucial role played by slaves in the abolition movement. Slave resistance worked in tandem with the moral suasion and political action of abolitionists. Samuel Sharpe’s slave rebellion in Jamaica (1831-1832) paved the way for Parliament’s passage of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which abolished slavery in the British West Indies 1834-1838.

By liberating themselves by crossing into Union Army lines, slaves joined Black and white abolitionists in pressuring Abraham Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and to run for re-election in 1864 on a platform supporting the Thirteenth Amendment, which ended slavery in the United States. Some of these former slaves also helped defeat the pro-slavery Confederacy in the Civil War.

I don’t blame white people living today for slavery nor do I credit them for its legal abolition. However, I do blame white supremacy (and unrestrained capitalism) for four centuries of the Atlantic slave system, which killed and immiserated millions of people of color and the de facto slavery that millions more were subjected to for many decades after the abolition of legal slavery.

Michael Conlin

Spokane