Henry Bibb

Henry Walton Bibb was born on 10 May 1815 in Shelby County, Kentucky, the eldest of seven sons of Mildred Jackson, an enslaved woman, and, he was told, James Bibb, a white man who later became a Kentucky state senator. His family was broken up as he and his brothers were sold one by one, and he was hired out to neighbouring farms as a boy.

Bibb made many attempts to escape, and finally freed himself in 1842. He became an anti-slavery lecturer and a well-known activist in the United States, and in 1848 married Mary Miles, an educator he met at an anti-slavery convention. In 1849 he published his autobiography, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, which publicised the horrors of slavery.

After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made him an easy target for capture, the Bibbs migrated to Canada and settled in Sandwich, Upper Canada, now Windsor, Ontario. They took fugitives from the Underground Railroad into their home, helped to establish a Methodist church, and Mary ran a day school.

In January 1851 Bibb launched The Voice of the Fugitive, the first major newspaper aimed at Black Canadians and Canada's first Black abolitionist newspaper, which Mary helped to edit. In 1851 he also helped found the Refugee Home Society with Josiah Henson, a project that bought almost 2,000 acres of land near Windsor and by his death had allotted 25-acre plots to about 40 families. The couple also organised a North American convention in Toronto that year.

In October 1852 Bibb was elected president of the Windsor Anti-Slavery Society. He died after a brief illness on 1 August 1854, aged 39, on the anniversary of the day slavery was abolished across the British Empire. Mary Bibb carried on as a teacher and later ran a store, and his Narrative remains an important account of enslaved life.