On August 24, 1759, William Wilberforce was born in Kingston upon Hull. He was a Christian human rights activist and cultural reformer. At the center of this heroic life was a passionate twenty-year fight to abolish the British slave trade, a battle Wilberforce won in 1807, as well as efforts to abolish slavery itself in the British colonies, a victory achieved just three days before his death in 1833. New Yorker Eric Metaxas wrote a biography of Wilberforce to go along with the movie “Amazing Grace.”
