Black Enlightenment Voices: Amo, Wheatley, Sancho and Equiano

People of African descent were not only subjects of Enlightenment debate; they were writers and thinkers who used its ideas. Anton Wilhelm Amo, born in what is now Ghana, studied at German universities and earned a doctorate in philosophy at Wittenberg in 1734, later lecturing at Halle and Jena. Phillis Wheatley, enslaved in Boston, published Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in London in 1773, after a group of prominent Boston men signed a statement confirming she had written them, an indignity that reveals the prejudices she faced.

Ignatius Sancho, a London shopkeeper, was a composer and letter-writer whose correspondence was published in 1782. Olaudah Equiano's 1789 autobiography, The Interesting Narrative, described the horrors of the slave trade and became a powerful weapon of the British abolition movement. These writers directly refuted claims of African intellectual inferiority and turned Enlightenment ideals of reason and rights against slavery.