In October I delivered a talk on ‘Staffordshire and Slavery’ for the North Staffordshire NHS Trust. My presentation touched on the practical links Staffordshire has to slavery, the relationship notable regional figures have with slavery, such as Josiah Wedgwood, and the documents held in Staffordshire’s Archive that relate to slavery.

Whilst there is a whole array of documents within Staffordshire’s archive on slavery, I brought along copies of a letter and poem from African American abolitionist Phillis Wheatley, addressed to William Legg the 2^nd, otherwise known as Lord Dartmouth. Wheatley was an enslaved person living in Boston, who advocated for the abolition of slavery and became the first published African American poet. Her letter and poem narrate the lead up to the American War of Independence and calls for the abolition of slavery from a black woman’s perspective. Wheatley’s letter and poem encouraged discussion about who she was as a person and, importantly, who normally narrates history. It was great to hear dialogue regarding the whitewashing of history and that the county’s links with slavery need to be better researched and understood.

However, there was also surprise among NHS staff that a document like this is available for the public to see, whether in person or through being sent images of the document. This is indicative of issues across British archives, whereby it is mostly academics that engage and use the documents they hold. It is the responsibility of archives to engage with wider community groups to ensure collaboration when trying to understand their archival collections. It is particularly important that the archive considers how to engage with members of Global Ethnic Majority communities, when addressing topics such as slavery, to understand how lived experience should affect the categorization and use of such documents. Thus, this talk was an important indicator of who knows of the archive, as well as what steps should be taken to address this. My PhD thesis aims to help Staffordshire’s archive better understand what they hold in relation to slavery and to disseminate this to the public.         

Hannah Smith – Keele University PhD researcher

As part of the Staffordshire History Centre project we are endeavouring to broaden and diversify collections and narratives and make our public programming more inclusive. We are striving to expand representation and inclusivity in both our service and our collections and reflecting on how we can better, and more sensitively, represent the diversity of the county’s past and present. The need for this approach is evident in the comparatively small quantity of archives and objects we have which tell the histories of ethnic minority communities, the use of racist and imperialist terminology in the collections’ catalogues.

We are taking a two-strand approach to this. Firstly, we are looking into the collections we currently hold, how we as a service interpret them, and how the public interact with them. Hannah Smith’s PhD project has been a reassuring start to this endeavour, and we are heartened by how well it has been received by communities. Our displays in the Staffordshire History Centre, and our community work, will broaden discussions around challenging items in our collections and share more diverse histories.

Secondly, we are centring communities at the heart of our work. The voices and opinions of communities are integral to bettering our service. We want communities to be actively engaged with the service and its collections and are working to develop stronger links and relationships with communities who have been previously underrepresented and excluded from the arts and culture sector. We hope to develop focus groups for future exhibitions and programming so we can collate and implement feedback. It is essential the service carries out more contemporary collecting projects to redress representational imbalance in our collections and this will be our focus over the coming year.  

Hannah Grange-Sales – Community History Development Officer