The Champions of Human Rights
(republishing, copying, no restrictions)
By: Father Shay Cullen
Last May 1st, I was honored to be invited by Lord David Alton to a special commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade. It was held at the House of Lords in the British parliament. The abolition of slavery came about by the courageous determination of a band of truly Christian campaigners. They took on the entire British establishment of politicians, church leaders, merchants and even royalty. They faced death threats, endured ridicule and rejection and met failure after failure in trying to have the parliament change the law and make it illegal to trade and transport human beings into bondage and slavery.
In 1765, all the pillars of European society were owners and investors in the profit making slave trade. The lure of great wealth blinded them to the teaching of Jesus Christ who declared us to be equally children of God, made in his image and likeness with the same rights and dignity worthy of the Kingdom. He called for the freedom of captives and identified with them, what you do to them you do to me, he said.
Jesus was then imprisoned, tortured, murdered and enslaved 13 million times, because that is the number of human beings that were kidnapped and sold into cruel slavery to build the wealth of Europe. Jesus taught us that Christian freedom, based on the truth, is even greater than the freedom won by Moses for God's people from the slavery of Egypt.
We may want to free the world, but that starts with saving one. We need faith and trust in a loving God who gave us life, free will and the mission to make this world a better place for the poor and the powerless.
Saving one brutalized slave is how the campaign to change the world of slavery began. It was to take 20 years to get a law passed to ban the trading of slaves in the British Empire but another 50 years to ban slavery in itself.
In 1765 in Mincing Lane, London, Granville Sharp, a young civil servant saw an African teenager, a slave, Jonathan Strong, brutally beaten and thrown on the ground by his owner David Lisle, a lawyer. Sharp, a Good Samaritan brought him to hospital. When Lisle got the boy back he sold him to a plantation owner in America and jailed him until a ship was available to take him. Granville Sharp took legal action to save him from a terrible fate and began a series of legal cases to show that slaves were protected in England under the constitution and could not be deported. He eventually won, the boy was saved and it was a breakthrough.
He was the first campaigner. More inspiring accounts like this are found in Slavery, Then and Now by Danny Smith, Kingston books. What drove him to risk so much for slaves? The same that drives all human rights workers then and now, the love of justice, compassion for the downtrodden, the love of Infinite Goodness.
Olaudah Equiano was kidnapped in the interior of Nigeria at 12 years old and sold to a plantation in Virginia he was then sold to a British naval officer and learned to read and write and bought his freedom. He became a Christian in London and tried to use the law to save more slaves being deported and teamed up with Granville Sharp in 1783 to expose the massacre of slaves on the Zong.
This was a slave ship captained by Luke Collingwood.
He threw 132 slaves overboard because they were sick. If they died of
sickness he would get no insurance but they were “lost at sea”. Equiano
and Sharp brought murder charges against Collingwood but chief justice
Lord Mansfield declared that the murder charge was irrelevant; killing
the slaves was just like killing horses he said. They were considered
property not human beings. The great painter Turner made it the subject
of his famous painting Slave Ship. The Quakers were active in opposing
slavery and were the first religious group to petition the parliament to
end slavery in 1783.
