About the International Slavery Museum
Transcript of the speech given by David Fleming at an event he attended with Loyd Grossman, chairman of National Museums Liverpool, to promote the International Slavery Museum in America, the year before the museum itself opened.
Good evening everyone. It’s a great honour to be here to share with you a remarkable and very important project. Loyd spoke about Liverpool’s many connections with America, and I would like to focus in on one of these, the one that is by far the most invidious.
Now, notwithstanding the extraordinary transatlantic crossing over of influences that created the Beatles, who changed popular music and popular culture over the entire world, there is another connection that has had an even greater global impact.
That connection is the transatlantic slave trade, the history and legacies of which can only be comprehended as a shared history, a shared story, an international story.
The story of the transatlantic slave trade is a key to understanding the modern world. We cannot begin to comprehend why Africa, South America, the Caribbean, Western Europe and the United States are as they are, without an understanding of this trade.
And yet, knowledge of this trade, and its profound consequences, is very poor.
Too few children in any of these countries, on any of these continents, know anything of the trade, of its role in creating our modern nations, in creating our modern cultures, in creating a dark legacy of racism and racial hostility, in creating an enduring inequality of opportunity, in creating a deep and endemic poverty in many parts of the world.
A combination of denial, shame, embarrassment and political indifference – added to the very poverty and lack of educational opportunity which are among the long term consequences of the slave trade – have conspired to create this widespread ignorance.
And so, we are at risk of failing to fulfil even the bleak prediction of William Prescott, a former slave, who wrote in 1937:
"They will remember that we were sold
But they won’t remember that we were strong
They will remember that we were bought,
But not that we were brave."
We are at risk of remembering none of this – not the strength or the bravery, not even the selling and the buying.
The port of Liverpool played a pivotal role in the slave trade, and while Britain entered the trade relatively late, during the 18th century Britain came to dominate the trade, and Liverpool entrepreneurs – a species whose success has rarely been matched in the annals of world commerce - overtook their counterparts in London and Bristol to dominate the British trade.
Liverpool was responsible for almost half of all British slaving voyages in the 18th century, when more than 5000 slave ships left the port. Liverpool ships transported about 1.5 million enslaved Africans in all. In the last two decades of the 18th century, Liverpool ships transported more Africans than the ships of any other port. During the period 1750-1800, the trade in enslaved Africans and the trade in goods produced by slaves (sugar, rum, coffee, cotton, and mahogany) constituted between a third and a half of all Liverpool’s trade.
Between 1698 and 1774 Liverpool merchants organised about 300 slave voyages to the Carolinas, to Virginia and to Maryland.
The slave trade helped transform Liverpool into a world port, the second city, and at its peak the greatest port, in the greatest Empire the world had ever seen.
And, even after the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, Liverpool continued to trade with two sides of the great slave triangle – with Africa, particularly in palm oil, and with the US and the Caribbean in goods such as cotton and sugar, produced, of course, by slave labour.
You will understand, I hope, why we at National Museums Liverpool place such an emphasis upon explaining to our visiting public about the transatlantic slave trade. Quite simply, no one can understand the rise of Liverpool without knowing of the role in that rise of the slave trade.
More importantly, we in Liverpool believe we have a duty to do all we can to help ensure that the reasons for, and the reality and consequences of the slave trade, are never again neglected, never again forgotten. This is, for us, an absolute imperative.
Because of this, my museum service created, 12 years ago now, the world’s first, the world’s leading, and, we believe, still the world’s only permanent museum gallery devoted to the transatlantic slave trade. This gallery, entitled Against Human Dignity and opened by Dr Maya Angelou, has done sterling service in the cause of education since its inauguration, and has been visited by millions of people.
In recognition of the international nature of the slave trade, the gallery was developed with the help of an international advisory board, and one of its members, albeit a Liverpool-based one, is here with us this evening – Dorothy Kuya, a great lady and a source of inspiration for all those of us who have the responsibility of building upon those foundations.
On a visit last month to the Transatlantic Slavery gallery, Secretary of State Dr Condoleezza Rice said to us:
“Thank you for the tour of this extraordinary museum. Your efforts help us both to remember and to overcome our past. All the best for the opening of the new museum.”
It is indeed now time to develop the Transatlantic Slavery gallery. It has done its job, but it is elderly and dated, and we must move the story on. We must tell a bigger story. Our vision is to replace the existing modest scale gallery with a brand new museum – the International Slavery Museum – to more fully promote the understanding of transatlantic slavery and its enduring impact.
We intend to open the first phase of this museum in August 2007, which is the bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade. The museum will be the centrepiece of nationwide celebrations and commemorations of the abolition and, I am delighted to say, in recognition of the museum’s status and significance, Her Majesty’s Government has agreed to meet some of the running costs, in perpetuity.
The total initial capital costs of this new museum are $17 million. So far we have available over $4 million, and have a grants and donations fundraising campaign under way which aims to secure the balance over the next 4 years.
The International Slavery Museum project will be delivered in three parts:
These are our next steps on an important journey. We believe this project is world-class, and that it has huge potential as an engine of research and international public understanding in a field that has not been explored anywhere near as much as it should.
I believe we can prove William Prescott wrong – that through our work, and that of our collaborators, people will remember the selling and the buying, but also they will remember the strength, and the bravery.
We are grateful for your attendance and your attention. We would welcome any comments you might have on what we have said, and any advice you may have on how we may best proceed. Indeed, we are here to begin a dialogue.
It is now my pleasure to introduce David Lammy MP, who is the British Government Minister for Culture, and therefore the sponsoring Minister for National Museums Liverpool and all other great British national museums.
My colleagues in the other British national museums will be green with envy when they discover – and I shall personally ensure that they do! – that the Minister has joined us here in New York to lend his support to our project.
David Fleming, director, National Museums Liverpool, 9 May 2006