The important key figures in abolition of slavery are:

1. William Wilberforce

2. Anthony Benezet

3. Granville Sharp

4. John Wesley

5. Ignatius Sancho

6. James Ramsay

7. John Newton

8. Olaudah Equiano

The person that inspires is William Wilberforce.

William Wilberforce was an English politician who became the voice of the abolition movement in Parliament.He was born in Hull, into a rich merchant family.After his conversion to evangelical Christianity, he gave up his racehorse, gambling and attendance at clubs. Although a serious young man, he was still fun to be with and, despite some of his friends thinking his new found belief was a madness, a childhood friend remarked, "If this be madness, I hope that it will bite us all!"

He inspires me because he was a native of Hull he wasn't a serious student. He later reflected, "As much pains were taken to make me idle as were ever taken to make me studious."

MLA

http://www.christianity.com

Ignatius
Sancho

Ignatius
Sancho was a composer, actor and writer. Sancho was born in 1729 on a slave
ship and spent the first two years of his life caged in Grenada. His mother
died when he was very young and his father killed himself, rather than become enslaved.
When he was two, his owner brought him to England.

He worked
as a servant in Greenwich and then for the Duke of Montagu. Sancho taught
himself to read and spoke out against the slave trade. He went on to compose
music and write poetry and plays. In 1773, Sancho and his wife set up a
grocer's shop in Westminster. Sancho was very well known and his shop became a
meeting place for some of the most famous writers, artists, actors and
politicians of the day. As a financially-independent householder, he became the
first black person of African origin to vote in parliamentary elections in
Britain

After his
death in 1780, Sancho's letters were published in a book, which became an
immediate best seller. Five editions of the book were published and his writing
was used as evidence to support the movement to end slavery.  Sancho had
mentioned slavery in many of the letters he had written to friends. In 1778,
for example, he commented that the main aim of all English navigators was
money. Sancho also made people aware of how the lives of Africans were made
miserable by the Slave Trade. The following extract his from one of the letters
published in 1782 shows the power of his arguments. The most inspiring thing
which I find about him is that the effect of his work was done after his death
than when he was alive. The way he fought to abolish slavery was that he did
not gather people instead he published books so that people across the globe to
know about slavery.

ADIL AGARWAL 8-A

BENJAMIN
FRANKLIN AND IS FIGHT AGAINST SLAVERY

Ellis' book details Benjamin Franklin's
attempt in 1790 to force Congress to confront the issue of slavery. In his
early life, Franklin held many of the same views of race as his fellow
neighbors. His newspaper publication had ads for slave trades and he personally
owned a slave couple until 1751. Franklin's wife Deborah had enrolled her
servants in the Philadelphia school and expressed her "high opinions of the natural capacities
of the black race." Benjamin Franklin himself observed how
these African American children were just as smart and learned just as quickly
as their white counterparts, and this led to a change in his opinions. On
February 12, 1790, a petition from Benjamin Franklin and the Pennsylvania
Abolition Society was presented to the House of Representatives calling for the
federal government to take steps for the gradual abolition of slavery and end
the slave trade. The petition stated that slavery and the slave trade were
incompatible with the values of freedom of the American Revolution. The
petition challenged the idea that the Constitution prohibited legislation
against the slave trade until 1808 by suggesting that the "general welfare
clause" (Article 1, Section 8) allowed the Congress to eliminate the slave
trade and abolish slavery.Franklin initially believed that
African slaves and their offspring were inferior to white Europeans and that
they couldn't be educated. He began to question his beliefs when he visited a
school where young African children were being taught. In 1763, he wrote a
letter to an English friend where he stated, "I was on the whole much
pleased, and from what I then saw, have conceived a higher opinion of the
natural capacities of the black race, than I had ever before entertained. Their
apprehension seems as quick, their memory as strong, and their docility in
every respect equal to that of white children."Franklin joined
and eventually became president of an abolitionist group founded a decade
earlier by the Pennsylvania Quakers.Some scholars believe that Franklin's
conversion to abolitionist beliefs was hastened by his animosity towards the
British. Franklin often expressed his belief that the British meant to enslave
the colonists.

by MANAV SHARMA 8F