The Liberated Africans Project: A Digital Publication Documenting Emancipation Courts in Sierra Leone, 1808-1896

FAIN: FA-251381-17

Henry Barrett Lovejoy
Regents of the University of Colorado, Boulder (Boulder, CO 80303-1058)

The digital publication of an open-source archive relating to emancipation courts in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Between 1808 and 1896, a network of British courts and international mixed commissions emancipated over 200,000 enslaved Africans in a global effort to abolish the slave trade. The website www.liberatedafricans.org will make accessible open-source archival materials from five courts located in Freetown, Sierra Leone, which was Britain’s main base of operation to suppress the Atlantic trade. This project will mobilize knowledge about Liberated Africans with case-by-case summaries of their emancipation trials conducted by the world’s earliest international human rights courts. The digital publication will include primary documents, synopses, maps, images, databases, tables, graphs, videos as well as query-based search engines. The long-term outcome will challenge and transform how we understand, analyze, and teach African and African Diaspora History, post-1807 intercontinental slave trades, the abolition movement, human rights law, and meanings associated with "slavery" and "freedom."