'From Bondage to Liberty'

Description:So what does all this add up to? Well, it’s clear that a whole area of our social history has been forgotten and is only now being re-discovered. The black presence in Britain in general and Birmingham in particular is much older than was at one time thought, and there is almost certainly a great deal more to be discovered about this intriguing part of our national and City’s heritage. If you investigate your own family, church or community you may discover that there were African American, Caribbean or African people amongst them much earlier than anyone previously thought possible. This history also has effects and implications for the present. Over 100 years after Stanford Highgate Baptist Church, 150 years old in 2004, is still here, its membership now largely people from the Caribbean. In the 1890 Stanford, the Afrcian American ex slave worked in a church of white working class people and now a white working class minister serves a congregation whose forbears were slaves! The struggle for racial justice which Stanford and others were so committed to still has profound relevance today. History, with its strange twists and surprising turns, has a lot to teach us.
1390 words.

Dr Paul Walker 2007.


[Note: The following exhibition gallery features several images, documents and text relating to Rev Peter Stanford's life and literary works. It also contains photographs of Highgate Baptist Church today, which serves a culturally diverse community. Many thanks to Paul Walker and those who appear in the photographs. Dr Andy Green]