Fighting racism through education is the focus for the Lancaster Black History Group (LBHG), a new grassroots community group of local residents.

Lancaster University academic and library staff are working in collaboration with LBHG to host the Slavery Family Trees Conference at Lancaster University Library on Saturday, November 13.

Over the last 10 months, members of the local community have been working alongside LBHG members including Dr Sunita Abraham, Lancaster University, Professor Imogen Tyler, Head of Sociology Lancaster University, Professor Alan Rice, Co-Director of the Institute for Black Atlantic Research, Jamie Reynolds History Teacher at Lancaster Royal Grammar School, and Geraldine Onek, Primary Teacher at Moorside Primary School.

They are supported by expert historians Melinda Elder, Dr Mike Winstanley, and Dr Nick Radburn and staff from Lancashire Archives and Lancaster Museums, to examine Lancaster’s historical links to transatlantic and plantation slavery.

More than 30 members from the community have researched the ways in which prominent local families in 18th century Lancaster were associated with transatlantic slavery, and how this has influenced the economic growth and development of Lancaster and the surrounding areas.

Also available online via Microsoft Teams, the one-day event will be introduced by Professor Rice, with talks from community researchers and invited speakers including:

• · Professor Catherine Hall who led on the Legacies of British Slave Ownership project at UCL which inspired the Slavery Family Trees project.
• Dr Richard Benjamin, who heads the inspirational International Slavery Museum team at National Museums Liverpool.

The event will also see the launch of:

• The Lancaster Slavery Family Trees Banner: made in collaboration with Sewing Café Lancaster The banner will hang in Lancaster University Library for the remaining part of this year.
• A new revised Lancaster Slave Trail Map: with inputs from the community research, made in collaboration with Lancaster Museums (led by Professor Rice, Carolyn Dalton and Ivan Frontani and supported by Lancaster University engagement team).
• A ‘Glocal’ Collection: a new library collection housed and funded by Lancaster University that seeks to provide local people, schools, and community groups with the opportunity to borrow books and other materials about Lancaster’s historical role as the fourth largest transatlantic slave-trading port in the 18th century, its ties to the larger ‘slavery business’ through trade in plantation commodities such as sugar, mahogany and cotton, and the role of prominent local families in Imperial trade and plunder (led by Prof Tyler, Dr Abraham, Caroline Gibson, Paul Newnham, Joshua Sendall).

Alongside the online conference event and Slavery Banner exhibition in Lancaster University Library there will be an online panel discussion focused on the Banner on November 16. The exhibition and discussion are supported by the ESRC Festival of Social Science.

The Slavery Family Trees project examines their family trees and highlights the interconnections both locally and globally to other families, business and faith groups associated with direct and/or indirect links to the slave trade and plantation slavery.

This conference provides an insight into some of these findings by highlighting how schools, university students, voluntary organisations, community and faith groups from across the city have come together to produce and record community stories and learning that will allow local people to work together to face the past, and in doing so transform the future.

The slavery family project has been partially funded by a grant from Necessity, and the conference and slave trail map was funded by the Centre for Alternatives to Social and Economic Inequalities, the Department of History, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Lancaster University Library and Lancaster University Engagement Office.