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1 Minister, made his first major speech in Parliament defending slavery. Liverpool was the powerhouse of the pro-slavery lobby and between 1787 and 1807, all 20 mayors were involved in the trade and its MPs were prepared to defend the trade in Parliament. You were either a Liverpool man or a humanity man and the City establishment made a spirited defence of the trade against any moves towards abolition. INSERT TAPE: BAND 7 (1 04 ). DRAMATISED READING In what light but in that of enemies of their country can we look upon those who, under the specious plea of establishing universal freedom, endeavour to strike at the root of this trade, the foundation of our commerce, the support of our colonies, the life of our navigation, the first cause of our national industry and riches. The liberty of the Negroes seems now to be the favoured idea, but the liberty of Britons to pursue their lawful occupation should not be forgotten. For the principle which has raised the commerce and navigation of this country is the right which every man in it possesses to carry on his own business in the way most advantageous to himself without any sudden interruption in the pursuit of it.

2 STUDIO LINK But despite the fulminations and the panic of the Liverpool merchants, the tide of opinion was turning. Emancipation of the slaves in the British territories came in It s been estimated that throughout the history of the trans-atlantic slave trade, more than 15 million Africans were landed alive in the Americas and the Caribbean. However, three times that number were lost to Africa. For some historians, the decimation of the population of Africa at this time made possible the ease with which many European powers were later able to colonise the Continent. Yet this trade, which put Liverpool on the map, was hard to find, at least until very recently, in its official histories. So is the city ashamed of its past? Well certainly the slave trade is not part of the modern tourist trail. Mike Boyle. INSERT TAPE.. BAND 8 (35 ) MIKE BOYLE I think slavery is an embarrassing thing for anyb for any person if you like who are.. they re trying to depict a, a setting for the tourist and obviously it, it s a, it s a er it s a very vivid period it s a very cruel period in, in history. It, it encompasses everything that is cruel and I think obviously that that s very much been taken on board when people have decided to lay out this museum, that you don t want to wash that dirty linen in public and I think this is a conscious effort to hide

3 it from history and the whole history of Liverpool, there is a section of it missing now because without slavery Liverpool would have remained an insignificant little fishing village. STUDIO LINK INSERT TAPE. BAND 9 (39 ) The curator of the Maritime Museum on the Albert Dock is Tony Tibbles. When Mike Boyle spoke to him in 1993, he recognised the limitations of the Museum s slave trade exhibits. TONY TIBBLES There s an awful lot of history to cover here and I think perhaps where we were slow was picking out some of the absolutely significant things and seeing that something like the slave trade was of crucial importance. There are other things that were happening in Liverpool at the same time. There were lots of things happening afterwards; we ve got a very wide range of um activities to cover here but I think we ve taken the criticism that what we have done could have been improved and that s what we re now trying to do. STUDIO LINK. The museum has now installed a permanent exhibition on the Atlantic Slave Trade. But Liverpool s involvement in the trade is not the central focus. Tony Tibbles.

4 INSERT TAPE: BAND 10(1 25 ). TONY TIBBLES Well obviously Liverpool is an important part of it but we have said that we want to look at the whole issue of the slave trade, the Atlantic salve trade, and that this is something that affected lots of other places in both this country and um elsewhere so that it s both a national and an international story and we want to cover all aspects of that. Liverpool was inevitably involved in all stages of it. The underlying intention is to really explain what the er significance of the slave trade was, the effect of the Diaspora, um the spread of people from Africa and to try and help explain why that happened. We hope that it will help people to understand what went on in the slave trade and what contribution that made to peoples really in three, three Continents because the legacy of the slave trade is still with us; the fact that there are black people in Liverpool, there are black people of African origin in the Americas, in the West Indies. Um, it helps to explain. STUDIO LINK. But will it help to explain the situation of blacks in Liverpool itself? Some people feel that this representation of slavery goes handin-hand with a more general amnesia about the city s more recent past. Would the city rather forget? June Henfrey. INSERT TAPE: BAND 11 (2 21 ). JUNE HENFRY I think it would like to forget, yes, because its part in the slave trade is a rather inglorious, not just one chapter but a series of chapters in its past and the facts about Liverpool and slavery together with a lot of facts about the existence in Liverpool of a black community.

5 over a long time had been very much suppressed. It s only very recently that there has been something of an official interest in all this and when it s compared with the interest that um is obvious in other aspects of Liverpool s social history, like the Irish and Liverpool as a point of departure for the Americas for example, it is still only a very slight interest and yet it is of vital importance. What s more, and I think most important from the human perspective, is got, you ve got a population which um started in a very small way at about the time of slavery and then was added to because Liverpool after slavery continued to trade with West Africa, it continued to trade with other parts of the Empire and that you got the development here of an interesting um community whose origin is not European but whose origin is British and Imperial in a very specific sense and I fancy that because Liverpool has been so anxious not to delve into its slave trading past, it has also been anxious not to look properly, incisively, at what has happened to that community through the years, through the centuries and that, therefore, it has not faced up to the problems of racial disadvantages which have accompanied the, community here throughout its period of long residence and um has only in the last 10 years, I would say, begun to admit that there is a problem here in terms of the disadvantages that spring from racism of a dimension which is greater than that in other cities in Britain where the black population is much newer.

6 STUDIO LINK. But who makes up this community? Well Africans have been in Britain since Roman times but most black people in Britain in the 18 th century were household servants. In Liverpool, as in other cities, African people were sold as slaves at this time. Later came the West African seamen, the earliest of whom were freed slaves. They were recruited by the shipping companies of Liverpool so the black population grew in the 19 th century. This century, black people from the colonies were called on to fight in both World wars or to work for the war economy. All this was before the great recruitment drive of the 1950s and 60s that brought many thousands of workers from the Caribbean. But what of the descendants of all those people who have contributed so much to the life and economy of Liverpool? Well for one thing, most of them now live in just one part of the city. INSERT TAPE BAND 12 (5 ) DARREN BADOE Living in Liverpool 8 to me is like living in open prison.

7 STUDIO LINK Darren Badoe is a student on a Black Access course at the Octagon Centre in the heart of Liverpool 8. Here with fellow students, Maria Farahani, Sue Beckett, Robin Aliu, Lesley Clark and Justin Henry, they talk about their experiences, the community s identity and their own history. INSERT TAPE: BAND 13 (2 07 ). STUDENT Since I ve been down here, I, I, I, I don t seem to have gone nowhere else except for Liverpool 8 and town and back to Liverpool 8. I know it s got nothing to do with me not, not wanting to go anywhere but it, it s it s st.. it s that racism element. As far as a job, j the job market is concerned, I don t see no black people getting employed. I ve had experience of working in other places, I ve worked in er British Leyland, I ve worked in various warehouses, I, I, I ve erm worked on building sites, I ve got experience of, of the motor trade, you know, so erm and as soon as I come down here now, you know, I, I, I couldn t get no work at all. STUDENT Being black or coloured as they said years ago, it was erm wasn t even spoken about, where you were told you re half-cast and there was this thing about erm your black, your half-c, you quarter-cast and this was the way people would go on. STUDENT because we ve grown up in a white society er we ve sort of been, the black history s sort of been hidden from us and like we ve been educated in a white society as a white person or persons if you like and erm I always feel

8 like if, if you know your history then you know your roots anyway. STUDENT I remember when I was at school and I used to come home and I used to say we used to have history lessons. I used to come home and say to my Dad, Dad, how come there s no black people ever mentioned in history. I mean, my Dad was African, he come, he started to go away on ships from Africa when he was 14 and he said like I was in the war, I was on this but there was never anything in school that said, this black man done this in the war, it was all this white man, that white man, another white man but never any blacks and I remember I said to him once, why, how come if you re telling me you ve been in the war and he s got medals as proof and you re not mentioned about it and he just said that s the way it is. And I ll never forget those words, that the way it is. STUDIO LINK Before its reputation for its poets, footballers, politicians and pop groups, even before its great Irish community and its place as the Gateway to America, Liverpool was a slave city first. And for many black Liverpudlians, it appears that part of Liverpool s legacy as a city that built its fortunes on the exploitation of African people, is a deep and continuing racism which prevails today.

9 INSERT TAPE. BAND 14 (2 03) JUNE HENFRY I think that the community has felt marginalised, excluded. It s never had access to services in the same way, er never had access to jobs in the same way, er unemployment in Liverpool is not a new phenomenon even for white people but within the black community is really much older than that and I know of black Liverpudlians in their 30s and 40s whose uncles and fathers couldn t get jobs, so that the way in which the city has gone ahead, as though this community did not actually exist, although everybody knew that it did, where it has been, the community has been criminalised in ways which are quite drastic erm in terms of er affecting any sense of well-being which erm could be sponsored and developed within the community itself. I talked to black Liverpudlians who remember having to take a specific route from Liverpool 8 to the centre of town for fear of being attacked, either on the way there or back, and always going in a group and if the group went ahead of you, you didn t go because you dare not go on your own I m talking about no more than 20 years ago. Now there have been improvements, there has been some acknowledgement of the sins of the past if you like, if I could roll them all together like that, but I still think that erm an attitude lingers of deeply entrenched historic racism and that we ve got to keep going at it if we are to shift it in any significant way. SINGING

10 STUDIO OUTRO. RICHARD MEEGAN Well, I hope you enjoyed the programme and that it helped to clarify some of the arguments in Book One. At the very least, it might convince you that when we talk about local worlds we are actually talking about relationships, both between people those local worlds and with other people in other local worlds. In other words, we re talking about the geography of social relations.