This website is a learning resource for anyone interested in Sandwell's past. We hope it will be particularly useful to primary schools studying local history and secondary schools studying slavery as part of the national curriculum.

Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council acknowledges the pioneering research of Dr Malcolm Dick at the University of Birmingham in uncovering the links between Sandwell and the slave trade and its abolition. We also acknowledge the work of Alex Robinson, University of Liverpool. Their work on the slave trade and slavery helps us to understand why relations between Africans and Europeans became unequal, and how Sandwell abolitionists were inspired to change it.

Slavery and the slave trade are connected to the development of Sandwell. Our intention here is to show you how some of those connections can be made and show important slices of history that you may not be aware of.

Profit from the slave trade is bound up with gun making, chain making, and building the canal network. Commitment to Methodism, Quaker teaching, and the idea of women organising themselves connected Sandwell to the opposition to slavery. Sandwell connections have been under reported and not recognised as important in the national story of slavery, the slave trade and the struggle to end it.

Today we study the legacy of the slave trade and slavery so that we may understand why relations between Africans and Europeans became unequal. We can look to the lives of Sandwell abolitionists for inspiration to change this.