A pair of English anti-slavery Staffordshire potter plates, including:

Flowers That Never Fade. Piety. Marked "Elsmore & Sons / England" to underside. With a tranferred vignette of a white mother and daughter handing alms to a seated Black person with the legend, "While God regards the wise & Fair. / The noble & the brave. He listens / to the beggar's prayer. & the poor Negro slave." -- Gathering Cotton. With a transferred agricultural scene of women and children harvesting cotton. - Each approx. diam. 5 3/4 in.

The abolitionst movement originated in England in the 17th and 18th century, supported by Quakers, other religious groups, and some Enlightenment thinkers. The slave trade was made illegal in the British Empire in 1807, but ownership of slaves in the colonies was not outlawed until 1833. After the Slavery Abolition Act, the movement turned its efforts to international enslavement, particularly in the American south, the source of British cotton imports. Each plate features alphabet on the rim, suggesting the plates were intended to be instructional for children.

[African American History, Black Americana, Frederick Douglass, Abolition, Emancipation, Slavery, Slave, Abolitionist, John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, Ceramic, Porcelain, Wedgwood]