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Video Anne Knight

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Abolition

Watch an actor read the words of Anne Knight writing to Lucy Townsend in 1840. In that year Benjamin Robert Haydon began painting a group portrait of the World Anti-Slavery Convention. Anne Knight was complaining that most of the leading women involved in the campaign against the slave trade were not going to be included in the picture. She claims Lucy Townsend had as much right to be in the picture as Thomas Clarkson himself. She points out that Clarkson only succeeded in ending the slave trade whereas Townsend (and the female anti-slavery movements) had brought about the end of the slavery itself.

Anne was born into a Quaker family and by 1830 she had assumed a key role in the Quaker attempt to end slavery, organizing public meetings and petitions. She formed the Chelmsford Female Anti-Slavery Society. A village for Jamaican freed slaves was named Knightsville, recognizing her contribution to abolition.

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