According to his famous autobiography, written in 1789, Olaudah Equiano (c.1745-1797) was born in what is now Nigeria. Kidnapped and sold into slavery in childhood, he was taken as a slave to the New World. As a slave to a captain in the Royal Navy, and later to a Quaker merchant, he eventually earned the price of his own freedom by careful trading and saving. As a seaman, he travelled the world, including the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the Atlantic and the Arctic, the latter in an abortive attempt to reach the North Pole. Coming to London, he became involved in the movement to abolish the slave trade, an involvement which led to him writing and publishing The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African (1789) a strongly abolitionist autobiography. The book became a bestseller and, as well as furthering the anti-slavery cause, made Equiano a wealthy man. These web pages aim to reflect the best in Equiano scholarship. Click on the links below to find out more, and return to this site soon, as information is regularly updated.

http://www.brycchancarey.com/equiano/

White Christian abolitionists may have got the name and status from the Abolitionist movement but the impetus was from Black ex-slaves who spoke out and fought for their rights.

William Wells Brown, 1814?-1884

William Wells Brown (ca. 1814-1884) was born in Lexington, Kentucky, the son of Elizabeth, a slave woman, and a white relative of his owner. After twenty years in slavery, Brown escaped to freedom in January 1834. He spent the next two years working on a Lake Erie steamboat and running fugitive slaves into Canada. In the summer 1834, he met and married Elizabeth Spooner, a free black woman; they had three daughters, one of whom died shortly after birth. Two years after his marriage, Brown moved to Buffalo, where he began his career in the abolitionist movement by regularly attending meetings of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society, by boarding antislavery lecturers at his home, speaking at local abolitionist gatherings, and by traveling to Cuba and Haiti to investigate emigration possibilities.

Brown's abolitionist career was marked by a turning point in the summer of 1843 when Buffalo hosted a national antislavery convention and the National Convention of Colored Citizens. Brown attended both meetings, sat on several committees, and became friends with a number of black abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and Charles Lenox Remond. Brown joined these two in their appeal to the power of moral suasion, their rejection of black antislavery violence (particularly the course espoused by Henry Highland Garnet in his "Address to the Slaves"), and their boycott of political abolitionism. Brown's expanded service to the antislavery movement, his increasing sophistication as a speaker, and his growing reputation in the antislavery community brought an invitation to lecture before the American Anti-Slavery Society at its 1844 annual meeting in New York City; in May 1847, he was hired as a Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society lecture agent. Brown moved to Boston and by the end of the year, he had published the successful Narrative of his life

http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/brownw/bio.html

White history has denied that blacks also had a part in History.

• Ernestine Rose
  August Bondi
  Rabbi David Einhorn

Tikkun Olam ("repairing the world.") has long been a strongly held value among Jews.

40 years ago Olaudah Equiano and William Wells Brown were unheard of Wilberforce and John Newton were in the history books the slaves and ex-slaves themselves had been relegated to a subservient position. The Maroons of inland Jamaica had been known from 1512, when black slaves had escaped from Spanish and Portuguese owners and either joined indigenous peoples or set up communities on their own. Sir Francis Drake enlisted several 'cimaroons' during his raids on the Spanish.

As to Tikkun Olam, nice idea but that has been set aside by Zionists in the pursuance of a Jewish state.

I do like the idea that History is being repaired to set Olaudah Equiano back into the history of Slavery.

Such is the legacy of a people who believe that they have been "chosen" by their personal monotheistic deity. The belief that they could make a real estate claim based on the "promise" of their local god after the passage of nearly two-thousand years is absurd.

The short answer yes. The long answer is for other threads. Besides Israel finished with the first destruction of the Temple and the Israelites going off into slavery (Nebuchadrezzar the Great), they came back to a small area called Judea that was only around Jerusalem (Cyrus). Jewish history gives it as slavery but Assyrian gives it as forced exile. So it's more like a claim based on being away for 2500 years.

Anyway the Jews didn't turn to revolt as the Jamaican slaves did, the tacky's revolt 1761.

This is true.
I guess I'm just a softy at heart.

Time passes quickly when you're enjoying yourself.