Right Thing, Right Now: Justice in an Unjust World

by Ryan Holiday

One of Clarkson’s best recruits was a man named Josiah Wedgwood, a wealthy pottery magnate who worked for the queen. Wedgwood wasn’t just convinced by Clarkson’s arguments, he was able to translate them to the public in vivid imagery. It was Wedgwood who commissioned a logo for the group of activists, a drawing of a kneeling slave, clamped in wrist and leg irons, holding up his arms, begging for mercy. “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” reads the banner at his feet. It’s impossible to conceive of how powerful this image would have been then, given that today we are children of the world it changed. We no longer question whether this lowly, pained slave is a human being, a brother to us all. But in the eighteenth century, this heartbreaking portrayal of the human costs of slavery hit people in the solar plexus, for the very first time disabusing them of many of the pleasant fictions that enabled their indifference.