Giving voice to a lost history: retracing the steps of the Black lives that shaped Manchester

They are the stories that have survived decades, despite being largely ignored by official acts of commemoration, obscured, or erased from the landscape. Now, chapters from Manchester’s Black history are being brought to life by a series of walking tours in the city, led by local historians, including Linford Sweeney, the Moss Side-raised genealogist, and the urbanist Hayley Flynn.

The Heritage in Action trail – guided walks exploring the lives of people whose labour made the city what it is and the city’s direct relationship with transatlantic slavery – will run in the city on 7 October, World Cotton Day. The events have been produced by the Guardian’s Legacies of Enslavement programme and the charity Greater Manchester Moving, which works to improve the region’s wellbeing through physical activity.

From the “great crowd” of Black Georgians who gathered at the city’s collegiate church to campaign for abolition in 1787, to the Pan-Africanist politicians, writers and economists who led postwar independence struggles after meeting in Manchester, or artists including Nina Simone and Miriam Makeba, whose Manchester concerts galvanised and inspired, the city has a rich history of Black activism.

But despite being home to one of the UK’s largest postwar Black communities, and the city’s evolution depending on the cotton produced by enslaved Africans, there are few commemorations of Black history in Manchester’s public realm. The Len Johnson Memorial Campaign is hoping to rectify that by bringing a bronze statue of the British boxer, civil rights activist and trade unionist to the city.

While there are sculptures of the Black peace campaigner Erinma Bell and Yomi Mambu, the city’s first Black lord mayor, in Manchester town hall, a statue of Johnson would mark the first outdoor statue of a Black person in Manchester.

Meanwhile, Black and working-class historians are taking to the streets. In May, the Guardian’s Legacies of Enslavement programme funded a series of trial walks for October’s forthcoming heritage trails, which explore the histories behind landmark locations.

They include the Peace Garden, where there is a plaque commemorating enslaved Africans and a quote from the abolitionist Olaudah Equiano. Both are dwarfed by a huge, nearby statue of Abraham Lincoln, raising questions about whose remembrance is privileged by society.

The great African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass was believed to be staying at an address St Ann’s Square when he learned his freedom from enslavement had been secured. There is no plaque there.

The branch of Holland & Barrett that now occupies the address was a stop on the Decolonial Dogs heritage trail, led earlier this year by Bilal Zafar Ranjha and Elmi Ali, as part of the partnership between the Guardian and GM Moving.

The trail began at Manchester Cathedral, telling the story of the 1787 antislavery meeting, led by the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, that led to one in five Mancunian adults – 10,500 people – signing a petition against the trafficking of enslaved Africans.

Ali said he believed such moments in history showed how “people are more progressive than institutions”. He added: “Do people know one in five of the population in that period signed up to support what would be the equivalent to Black Lives Matter now?”

Chetham’s Library was another landmark building on the tour. There, Ali said: “This building knows who traded cotton in Manchester … What it does not contain, what Manchester never recorded, are the names of the people who picked that cotton.”

Drawing on research from Dr Cassandra Gooptar, of the University of Hull’s Wilberforce Institute, Ali told the stories of enslaved Africans including Archy Gordon, 50 years old and blind, and Sam Kerr, 19, who lived on the Success plantation in Hanover, Jamaica, which was owned by one of the Manchester Guardian’s founding investors, George Philips.

“Historical amnesia and whitewashing history” is how Ranjha described the situation, which has left these stories untold.

Reflecting on this “amnesia”, Prof Anandi Ramamurthy, an academic specialising in post-colonial histories, culture and mental health who took part in the Decolonial Dogs trail, said: “To me, if you want people to talk about community cohesion, that cannot be done without transparency and without accountability – all the institutions of Manchester need to come forward and look at their past, so we’re able to come together and to envision a different future.”

Ali added: “Global majority citizens of the country are framed constantly as new arrivals, which is how erasure works – but Africans have been here for centuries.”

Sweeney’s 7 October tour looks at the impact changes to the built environment have on local identity and memory in Black communities.

The streets of Moss Side and Hulme in Manchester have been remodelled substantially twice in the past 60 years – first by the slum clearance programmes of the 1960s, in which Edwardian terraces were condemned, and again when 1970s buildings such as the Moss Side Precinct shopping centre and Hulme Crescents council estates were pulled down in the 1990s.

Sweeney’s tour links lost and surviving landmarks from the area with the legacy of the Windrush generation, weaving the stories of the workers, activist spaces, venues, shops, and vanished streets of the area with personal recollections.

Stops on the tour include Hulme’s Nia Centre – “a beacon of cultural expression and community empowerment” – where Simone performed in 1991, Sweeney says.

A May trial event for Sweeney’s tour brought memories flooding back for Pauline Weir, a lifelong community organiser. Weir recalls how Black homeowners such as her father got “next to nothing” for their homes when they were subject to compulsory purchase orders under the postwar “slum clearance” scheme.

“I think the lack of recognition of our history is purposeful,” Weir said. “And I think when they had the compulsory purchase orders, it was purposeful. Every time they’ve demolished physical buildings, they demolish community.”

Flynn’s “myth-busting” city centre tour raises deep questions about the city’s approach to memorialisation over centuries.

Starting at the River Irwell, where Manchester city centre meets Salford, it moves to the Northern Quarter, via stops including the Peace Garden, Chinatown and the gay village, drawing on Flynn’s knowledge of urban histories and countercultures.

Flynn explores the present-day politics of space, gentrification and community, while looking back at the past that shaped Manchester’s urban landscape.

Reflecting on abolition and the solidarity shown by some Lancashire cotton workers with enslaved Africans, Flynn said: “When we celebrate the city’s support for abolition we symbolise that through the iconography of Abraham Lincoln, not of the enslaved people themselves, nor, on a local level, the labourers who went on strike.”

Against this backdrop, the Grass Routes Movement CIC x Rooted Liberation walk, featuring Sajida Ismail and Anisa Saleh, is an act of healing, exploring the violence that underpinned the relationship between the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans and Manchester’s waterways, and commemorating the human toll with moving acts of remembrance.

Their interactive, immersive, poetic walk travels along Manchester city’s canals to Manchester Science and Industry Museum, taking in sights of lost industry, goslings and graffiti.

Saleh said: “It’s not about pointing the finger, or apportioning blame. It’s about how we can be together and give voice to this history.

“A walking activity is a vessel for that difficult task, and the care that underlies the process is part of the ongoing legacy, the corrections, the acknowledgments. Let’s all be a part of that, in ways that are helpful and healing.”

You can book tickets for a World Cotton Day heritage city trail here