Mary Prince

Mary Prince was born into slavery at Brackish Pond, in Devonshire Parish of the British colony of Bermuda, on the first of October 1788. Her father was a sawyer, enslaved by David Trimmingham, and her mother a house-servant held by Charles Myners. She entered the world already claimed as another's property, one of a family of brothers and sisters bound to the same fate.

When Myners died in 1788, the infant Mary and her mother were sold together to the household of Captain Darrell, who gave the child as a companion to his young granddaughter, Betsey Williams. It was only later, at about the age of twelve, that Mary was torn from that place and sold for thirty-eight pounds to Captain John Ingham of Spanish Point. Further sales followed — to a master who set her to labour in the punishing salt ponds of Turks Island, and in time to John Adams Wood of Antigua.

In 1828 the Woods carried her to London, where the law would not compel her return to bondage. There, living under the care of the Anti-Slavery Society and Thomas Pringle, she dictated her life to Susanna Strickland. Published in 1831 as The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, it was the first narrative of a Black enslaved woman printed in Britain, and it ran through three editions in a single year, stirring the abolitionist cause.

She was the first Black woman to publish an autobiography in Britain and the first woman to bring an anti-slavery petition before Parliament. Though the record loses her after 1833, her testimony endured — a voice that refused silence and made the conscience of a nation hear the truth of the enslaved. May her courage be forever honored.