Day 1: Leeds – Always Leading The Way

Talk about the history of the abolitionist movement in this country, an immediately you think of the port towns on the coast which gave Britain her oceanic bond to the rest of the world. You think of Wilberforce, the Hull parliamentarian whose strident advocacy brought the established acceptance of the practice of slavery to an end.

Rarely, however, does the city of Leeds get a mention in the history of the movement. But the hard work, enthusiasm, and sheer dogged persistence of one undergraduate at Leeds University may well change all that.

Yosra Awad studies English here in the city. About to enter her final year, she has spent the better part of the last twelve months researching the role that Leeds played in the abolitionist story, with the support of the Undergraduate Research Scholarship funded by Alumni Donors.

On Day 1 of my August adventure, I was invited to join her as she travelled around the inner cities capturing stills and footage for an online showcase hoped to go live within the coming months.

Yosra has worked hard, trawling through the archives to find clippings about great global names in the emancipation story like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of polemic anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin) visiting Leeds to address local supporters.

She has had great support in her work from Tess Hornsby Smith, who works at the university to connect students with the rest of the city, giving them the chance to have a real impact on the rest of the wider community. Having studied for three years at Oxford, I know this is something on which academia all too often falls short. As Tess reminds me, normally arts students spend their degree write essays which only end up getting thrown in the bin (again, I know this to be true). The opportunity to learn about the wider society outside the cloistered academic bubble is part of what motivates Yosra and many others, and I don’t know about you readers, but I would welcome more people following Tess’s lead!

Yesterday Yosra took pictures of some of the sites in the city centre which have a place in the movement’s story. For instance, the building where nowadays merry thirty-somethings go and pretend to be Whitney Houston for the night (OK Karaoke looking down Greek Street) used to be home of the Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society here in Leeds. Consider that the next time you’re putting your heart and soul into your rendition of ‘Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’.

We took in Temple Mills and the Marshall Mills in Holbeck too, as her work places the abolitionist movement squarely in the context of Leeds’s growth as an industrial and cosmopolitan city.

But Yosra’s work is not only a historical project. Ably driven around by Tess’s boyfriend Val (all four of us in the car made for a snug fit), we first visited Chapeltown and Harehills, looking in particular at the beautiful, bright-coloured mural at Bankside, dedicated to Mandela, Gandhi, King, all the way to Pat Regan whose own story reminds us of the challenges we have to face up to both within and between different cultures and different races today if we want to be a truly thriving society.

You can find out more about the project by looking at the project’s page on Facebook (and see some of the shots taken by Yosra and Tess yesterday), and follow their progress on Twitter. I wish Yosra very well indeed, and I know you will too!