Granville Sharp

Granville Sharp was the earliest of the major British abolitionists, taking up test cases to challenge the legality of slavery in England. His efforts lay behind the 1772 Somerset judgment, widely read as meaning an enslaved person could not be forcibly removed from England. He pressed the courts over the Zong massacre, in which a ship's crew threw enslaved Africans overboard to claim insurance, using it to expose the trade's brutality. A founder of the abolition society, he also helped establish the Sierra Leone settlement for freed slaves.