Joseph Sturge - Early Career

Early Career

Joseph Sturge went to Birmingham to work in 1822. A member of the Religious Society of Friends (commonly known as Quakers), he refused to deal in grain used in the manufacture of alcoholic spirits, although he was a corn factor.

In rapidly expanding industrial Birmingham, he was appointed an alderman in 1835. He opposed the building of the Birmingham Town Hall, to be used for performances, because of his conscientious objection to the performance of sacred oratorio. Joseph Sturge became interested in the island of Jamaica and the conditions of its enslaved workers. He visited it several times and witnessed first hand the horrors of slavery, as well as the abuses under an apprenticeship system designed to control the labour of all former slaves above the age of six for 12 years. He worked for emancipation and abolition with African-Caribbean and English Baptists.

In 1838, after full emancipation was authorised, Sturge laid the foundation stone to the "Emancipation School Rooms" in Birmingham. Attending were United Baptist Sunday School and Baptist ministers of the city.

In 1839 his work was honoured by a marble monument in a Baptist mission chapel in Falmouth, Jamaica. It was dedicated to "the Emancipated Sons of Africa".