Morant Bay, courthouse

In the decades after Britain’s abolition of slavery in 1833 the sugar islands of the British West Indies, which had once been so incredibly profitable, started to go into decline. With much of the island’s soil exhausted, by the 1860s there were thousands of acres that no-one was farming. And hundreds of thousands of former slaves had no work and no land. People were starving. The crisis came to a head in a small town called Morant Bay.
The spark that ignited the flame was a case held in this courthouse in 1865 over the eviction of a man who had been farming on an abandoned estate.
A crowd of about 500 - 600 local people headed by rebellion leader Paul Bogle gathered outside, where they were met by the local militia, and the local magistrate began to read the riot act.
People in the crowd responded by throwing stones and then the militia opened fire, killing 7 of them. By the end of the day, the crowd had killed 18 people, including militia men and other officials.
Then the riot fizzled out. This was a small, localised rebellion, but the response of the Jamaican governor, Edward Eyre, made it infamous. On his orders a brutal act of vengeance began, with the killing, beating and terrorising of men, women and children, singled out because of the colour of their skin.
Over 1,000 Jamaicans were brutalised or killed following the rebellion.
This photo was taken for Black and British: A Forgotten History, a BBC series revealing the extraordinary long relationship between the British Isles and people whose origins are in Africa.