Remembering Bournemouth's freed slave

Two former Bournemouth mayors are lobbying for a statue to be erected of a former black American slave turned missionary who settled in this seaside town

- Jeremy Miles

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When Black History Month was first launched in the UK more than 30 years ago many people believed it had little to do with Dorset. After all, this quintessentially English county of ours – the home of Thomas Hardy and William Barnes – was surely a bastion of almost exclusively white history?

How wrong they were. Dorset actually has a rich multi-cultural past dating back some 400 years. Now two former Bournemouth mayors, Dr Rodney Cooper and Philip Stanley Watts, are calling for a statue to be erected in the town in memory of former black American slave turned missionary Thomas Lewis Johnson.

This remarkable man was born into slavery in Virginia in 1836 and freed by decree of Abraham Lincoln in 1863. He would go on to travel and preach in not only the US but Africa, Europe and the UK and would write the highly-regarded autobiographical book Twenty-Eight Years a Slave: or the Story of My Life in Three Continents.

Eventually, Johnson decided to make his home in England and, with his wife Sarah, settled in Bournemouth for the final decades of his life, devoting his time to writing, public speaking and teaching both adults and children about the history of slavery and the power of peace. He even kept a display of slave whips and shackles at his home at 66 Paisley Road. Now firmly part of Southbourne, at the turn of the century when Johnson lived there, it often allied to neighbouring Boscombe. Johnson named the house Liberia, a reference to his missionary work in Africa.