Project Introduction

This narrative exhibit pieces together the life of William Ivens Craft (1855–1926), an individual whose life exemplified the struggle and perseverance of those a generation removed from American slavery, but still subject to the far-reaching, transatlantic impacts of the racist institution. Entrenched anti-Blackness in the United States forced William Ivens to leave his family behind, just as his famous parents William and Ellen Craft had done thirty years prior, and return to his home country – England – to seek a freer life. This exhibit appears as part of the One More Voice project.

The exhibit consists of thirteen digital rooms (i.e., separate webpages) and engages with the themes of 1) the “afterlife of slavery” (Hartman 2008, 6), 2) transatlantic anti-Blackness in the Victorian world, and 3) the meaning and legacy of family and stories. It also brings together over twenty unpublished letters from the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The language used in this exhibit to talk about slavery engages with the methodology laid out by Pier Gabrielle Foreman, et al. in “Writing about Slavery/Teaching About Slavery: This Might Help,” a community-sourced document.

This exhibit resists reducing William Ivens’s experience to the tale of a Black man in a white world, in recognition of the complexity of a life lived at the crossroads of race, class, and transnationalism. We reconstruct his story here as part of what scholar Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina (2003, 7) describes as “a careful examination of how black people in Victorian England worked against and through the prevailing racialism and now claim their right place in English history.” William Ivens Craft created for himself a home, a life, and, most importantly, a family, despite the setbacks, of which there were many. As he wrote (Craft 1881a) to an acquaintance in 1881, “I [...] am striving to do the best I can.” His descendants are the inheritors of his story; they played a key role in developing this exhibit. They carry on the work of re-remembering what their ancestors could not pass on. In doing so, they are helping to rewrite the history of Victorian England as well as the nation’s present and its future.