Every February, Black History Month invites us not only to celebrate achievement, but to correct the record. Some stories are not merely incomplete; they are mis-framed in ways that shape how power, morality, and leadership are understood today. The history of abolition is one of them.
Too often, abolition is taught and retold through a familiar and comforting lens — one reinforced in classrooms, pulpits, and popular history alike. In this version of the story, good white men, animated by conscience and Christian conviction, rose to rescue enslaved Black people from a cruel system. William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect stand at the center. Abolition appears as an act of moral generosity bestowed from above, with history bending toward justice once powerful Christians finally chose righteousness.
This narrative is not merely incomplete. It is structurally distorted.
What is routinely omitted is a far more unsettling truth: Black Christians were the first abolitionists in Britain, articulating the moral, theological, and experiential case against slavery decades before Wilberforce ever rose to speak in Parliament. Abolition did not begin as a white evangelical project that later incorporated Black suffering. It began as Black Christian testimony, forged in the crucible of enslavement, displacement, and faith under duress.
Men such as Olaudah Equiano, Ottobah Cugoano, and Ignatius Sancho — formerly enslaved Africans who became writers, intellectuals, and public witnesses in Britain — did not wait to be rescued. They spoke first. They wrote first. They petitioned Parliament first. They named slavery not merely as an economic injustice or regrettable excess, but as a sin against God, a violation of divine law, and a moral catastrophe for Christian civilization itself.
Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, published in 1789, accomplished what no parliamentary speech could on its own. It forced British readers to encounter the inner life of an enslaved Christian man — his terror, his dignity, his faith, and his moral clarity. Cugoano went further still. In his 1787 treatise, he rejected gradualism outright and condemned slavery as an evil requiring immediate repentance and abolition. His argument was not political moderation but prophetic indictment. Sancho, writing earlier, undermined the racial assumptions that sustained slavery by his very presence as a literate, voting Black Briton whose letters exposed the hypocrisy of Christian society.
These figures were not marginal voices whispering from the sidelines. They organized collectively as the Sons of Africa, directly addressing Members of Parliament and shaping public discourse. They were not speaking after Wilberforce. They were speaking before him — and, in many cases, to him.
Their Christianity matters. These were not secular radicals later baptized into abolitionist respectability. They were devout believers who framed slavery as incompatible with the gospel. Yet, paradoxically, they worshipped largely in white churches — not because racial equality had been achieved, but because Black churches in Britain barely existed at the time. Inside those white sanctuaries — often in pews where they could not lead, vote, or fully belong — Black Christians proclaimed a moral truth that exposed the church’s complicity even as it drew upon its language.
By the time Wilberforce entered Parliament and the Clapham Sect organized its reform efforts, the moral groundwork had already been laid. The humanity of enslaved Africans had been established. The theological indictment of slavery had been articulated. The contradiction between Christianity and racial bondage had been named. What Wilberforce brought was not the original moral insight, but institutional power — access to Parliament, legislative strategy, and political endurance.
This does not diminish Wilberforce’s role. It clarifies it. He was not the originator of abolitionist conscience; he was its translator into law. Moral vision preceded political viability. Black Christians supplied the first; Wilberforce supplied the second. The danger lies not in honoring Wilberforce, but in isolating him — thereby reinforcing a recurring civilizational myth: that justice arrives only when the powerful discover virtue, rather than when the oppressed speak truth.
That myth carries consequences beyond historical accuracy. It trains generations to imagine Black people as objects of rescue rather than agents of moral leadership. It reinforces a theology in which Black suffering produces patience but not authority, endurance but not moral insight. And it subtly absolves Christian institutions by locating repentance exclusively among reformers, rather than among those who named the sin first and paid the price for doing so.
The abolitionist movement did not begin with benevolence. It began with Black Christian witness — with faith refined by bondage and courage sharpened by exclusion. Before Wilberforce, before the Clapham Sect, before abolition became respectable, Black Christians stood and declared that slavery was incompatible with the God they worshipped.
This is their story. And any account that begins elsewhere begins in distortion.
Ed Gaskin is Executive Director of Greater Grove Hall Main Streets and founder of Sunday Celebrations
