Welcome to my VIRTUAL tour of London!

After the success of my first Black Abolitionist Tour of London, I’ve created three other virtual tours of the city and of Britain/Ireland that highlight the inspirational activism of Black freedom fighters who crossed the Atlantic in the c19th to fight in the social justice struggle.

This tour completely focuses on Black American Women. While their role has often been invisibilised in the archive, Black women played an essential role in the transatlantic antislavery movement. In this tour, we will visit London, Edinburgh, Birmingham and Liverpool to learn about the courageous Ellen Craft (who disguised herself as a white man to escape slavery); Sarah Parker Remond (who led a very successful antislavery lecturing tour in England and then emigrated to Italy) and Ida B. Wells-Barnett (the fierce and inspiring anti-lynching activist who risked her life to champion social justice on both sides of the Atlantic).

African American activists travelled to the British Isles during the c19th to educate audiences about the brutalities of slavery, to write and publish their narratives, raise money to legally purchase themselves or family members, or to settle and work here. In their radical and politicised journeys of freedom, they travelled thousands of miles to give lectures in large cities like London and Edinburgh, to small villages like Bakewell, Keswick and Pembroke.

Whilst some of the buildings visited by these individuals do not remain, it is impossible to deny that we walk past important Black history sites on a daily basis, without realising the impact these men and women had on British society.