James Stout

Again, there's sentiment.

There's abolitionist sentiment.

There's people of conscience and care who are informed and know how bad it is.

They're just not really unified yet, right?

There's a small organization of Quakers, but for the most part, most of the people who are upset about slavery aren't together yet, right?

And it's over this case that they're going to get stitched together, right?

Yeah.

The letter finds an audience, at first mostly with England's small Quaker anti-slavery movement, but it doesn't cause an immediate broader uproar on its own.

However, it succeeds in reaching the one person who, it turns out, most needed to hear it, a freedman named Olada Equiano.

And this guy is one of the coolest dudes I have ever heard of.

Fucking Equiano is a fascinating man.

Have you heard about this person, James?

Yeah, I'd love to assign Equiano to my undergraduate courses.

Yeah, yeah.

He's got a book.

Yeah, and you can find it online.

It's free, right?

We'll be quoting from it some here.

A fascinating person.

So Equiano had been born around 1745 in Igbo, part of modern-day Nigeria, which was then part of the Kingdom of Benin.