Thread by @natlibscot

We have launched an online learning resource – Struggles for Liberty: African American Revolutionaries in the Atlantic World. It shares the fight for social justice of African American freedom fighters, some of whom campaigned in 19th century Scotland.

#StrugglesforLiberty

Struggles for Liberty takes its name from the phrase ‘struggles in the cause of liberty’, written by Lewis Henry Douglass (eldest son of Frederick Douglass) of his mother Anna’s tireless antislavery and social justice activism.

#StrugglesforLiberty

The resource is structured by theme: the Story of the Slave; the History of Black Abolition; the US Civil War; African American activists in Scotland; and the Anna Murray and Frederick Douglass Family. View it at > digital.nls.uk/learning/strug…

#StrugglesforLiberty

The resource also includes interactive maps and downloadable learning activities for teachers, including activities mapped to the Curriculum for Excellence.

#StrugglesforLiberty

#StrugglesforLiberty includes material by or about African American reformers, freedom fighters and campaigners including Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), Nathaniel Turner (1800–1831), Sojourner Truth (1797–1883), David Walker (1796–1830), and Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931).

Pictured: front cover of the book ‘Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom’, 1860, by anti-slavery campaigners William and Ellen Craft, who had escaped slavery in Georgia.

#StrugglesforLiberty

Over centuries, millions of people of all genders, ages, beliefs, kinship groups and nations were, in Frederick Douglass’s words, ‘stolen from Africa and compelled to serve as slaves by white enslavers’ who he condemned as ‘human traffickers in blood’.

#StrugglesforLiberty

Black women, children, and men lived and died in the northern and southern Americas and Caribbean in a traumatising, and to use Douglass’s words, ‘mind-body-and-soul’ destroying ‘hell-black system of human bondage’.

#StrugglesforLiberty

19th-century African American radical reformers campaigned for the end of slavery in the US by every means necessary.

(Pictured: Anna Murray Douglass (1813–1882), anti-slavery campaigner and Underground Railroad operator. Credit: Frederick Douglass National Historic Site.)

Frederick Douglass and Harriet Ann Jacobs were among the many revolutionary self-liberated social justice campaigners who sought to awaken the US nation and the world to slavery’s atrocities by engaging in acts of authorship and political activism.

#StrugglesforLiberty

‘There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death… no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted.’ Harriet Tubman (1820–1913)

#StrugglesforLiberty

At the outbreak of the Civil War in the United States, Frederick Douglass commanded a white racist nation to ‘Unchain your black hand!’

(Pictured: Portrait of Frederick Douglass from his autobiography ‘My Bondage and My Freedom’, 1855)

#StrugglesforLiberty

Frederick Douglass gave powerful speeches inspiring more than 200,000 Black men to enlist as combat soldiers in the Union army > digital.nls.uk/learning/strug…

#StrugglesforLiberty

Our @natlibscotmaps collections, together with historic records have been used to create three interactive map viewers pinpointing the places where African American activists in Scotland lived, worked and spoke to their audiences > digital.nls.uk/learning/strug…

#StrugglesforLiberty

Ordnance Survey maps from the 1850s–1900s form the background to each map viewer, corresponding to the time when abolitionists were in Scotland. The viewers also include descriptions of events and pictures of some of the places and people involved.

#StrugglesforLiberty

Lisa Williams, of @edincarib, discusses how ideas of race influenced the debates by Enlightenment thinkers concerning slavery and colonialism >

#StrugglesforLiberty

In this talk, Matthew Lee, a PhD student co-supervised at the Library, examines Scotland’s relationship with the Atlantic slave trade through our collections >

#StrugglesforLiberty

Professor Celeste-Marie Bernier, Chair of Black Studies at @uniofedinburgh traces the celebrated life of Frederick Douglass alongside the hidden lives of his children in this recorded talk >

#StrugglesforLiberty

We also have links and information to further resources on the topics explored in #StrugglesforLiberty > digital.nls.uk/learning/strug…

Our thanks to Professor Celeste-Marie Bernier and the Walter O. Evans (pictured) Foundation for their expertise and support in the making of this resource.

#StrugglesforLiberty