Wilberforce got the statue. This man got the mud. Thirty-five thousand miles of it. His name was Thomas Clarkson. Born in England. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 Cambridgeshire. 1760. He was twenty-four years old when Cambridge set him an essay question. "Is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will?" He knew nothing about slavery. So he started reading. Two months later he couldn't stop. He won the prize and rode home to London with something nobody had given him. A conscience he couldn't put down. Halfway there, on a quiet country road, he stopped his horse. Sat in the silence of the English countryside. The trade was real. He had just proved it. And somebody had to stop it. So he gave up the church and got to work. Bristol. Liverpool. Every slave port in Britain. Into the taverns, the back rooms, the ships. Asking sailors what they had seen below decks. Men who had been there. Who knew what happened on the Middle Passage. Some refused. Some were threatened. Some were bought. Clarkson kept riding. Thirty-five thousand miles. Ten years. Every testimony written down in longhand on the road. All of it handed to a young MP named William Wilberforce. Wilberforce went to Parliament and gave the speeches. Clarkson saddled up and went back out. In 1792 they put a petition together. Not from London. Not from the powerful. From ordinary men and women. Market towns, village squares, chapel steps across England. Four hundred thousand signatures. The largest petition in British parliamentary history. Parliament voted it down. So they went again. And again. Eighteen years of going again. 25 March 1807. The Slave Trade Act passed. Britain outlawed the trade and turned the Royal Navy loose to hunt the ships. History gave Wilberforce the statue. Coleridge called Clarkson the moral steam engine of the abolition movement. Clarkson lived to see slavery abolished completely in 1833. An old man of seventy-three, who had started this at twenty-four. He died in 1846. The last surviving founder of the original committee. He never held office. Never gave the famous speeches. He just got back on the horse. For sixty years. Did they teach you his name? Together we keep our history alive. proudofus.co.uk/support Be part of us. Be Proud Of Us. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧

Britain locked up 10,000 Quakers. 450 died in prison. 🇬🇧 Their crime, under the Quaker Act 1662, was refusing to swear an oath. Because they told the truth all the time. Barclays Bank: founded 1690 by Quakers John Freame and Thomas Gould. Lloyds Bank: founded 1765 by Quaker Sampson Lloyd. Cadbury: founded 1824 by Quaker John Cadbury in Birmingham. Clarks shoes: founded 1825 by Quakers in Somerset. They were the first organised religious body in the world to formally condemn slavery. The Germantown Petition, 1688. London Yearly Meeting followed in 1761. Decades before Wilberforce. Elizabeth Fry walked into Newgate Prison in 1813. The Gaols Act passed in 1823. At their peak they were 0.2% of the population. One in five hundred people. They changed everything. Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧