"It is all a Thing of the Past": An Interview with Frederick Douglass, 1886

The cataclysmic end of the American Civil War signaled the decline in black abolitionist transatlantic journeys to Britain. Hundreds of African Americans, many of whom were formerly enslaved individuals, traveled to British shores from the 1830s to the 1860s, to lecture against slavery, raise money to free family members still enslaved, or settle. Between 1876 and 1895, only three activists received extensive coverage in the press: Josiah Henson, Frederick Douglass, and Ida B. Wells exploited their celebrity to remind British audiences that slavery was not dead, and that its specter continued to haunt not only them but also all African Americans in the United States. Douglass remains unique, however, in the fact he was the only black activist to receive extensive British press coverage until his death in 1895.