Black History in Manchester- Henry Box Brown

I've recently discovered the website "I Love Manchester", and alongside the current news about what's on around Manchester, they are running a series of posts about Manchester history.
Some time ago I got interested in trying to find out about black people living in the UK throughout history, but I wasn't able to find out very much about Manchester - until now.
#16 of the series The Story of Manchester in 101 Objects is about the campaign to abolish slavery.
As Cottonopolis, Manchester imported vast amounts of cotton from the Southern States of the USA - cotton that was picked by slaves. But towards the end of the 18thC, the case for the abolition of slavery began to be made, and Thomas Clarkson came to speak at what is now Manchester Cathedral (then just the parish church) in 1787, to make the case for the end of slavery. A huge crowd attended his speech, including a group of 40 or 50 black people standing near the pulpit.
So in 1787 there were at least 40 or 50 black people living in Manchester.
The talk led to abolition societies being set up in Manchester, and when William Wilberforce was collecting signatures for a petition to present to Parliament on the subject 10,639 signatures were collected in Manchester, which was the largest single petition. Sadly, it was lost in the fire in Parliament in 1834.
In 1792, there was a boycott of West Indies sugar to protest about slavery.
One former slave settled in Manchester. He escaped his owners in Virginia in 1849 by posting himself in a box to a group of abolitionists in Philadelphia, and was thus known as Henry "Box" Brown. For a while, he became an abolitionist speaker in the US, but in 1850 the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, and Henry was worried about his safety, so he travelled to Liverpool. He toured with an anti-slavery panorama, becoming a showman and magician.
Back in the US, Henry had escaped his master after he had refused to buy Henry's wife and children when they were put up for sale. In England, he married again, to Jane, a Cornish tin miner's daughter, and later toured the US as a performer with his new family.
While in England, he settled in Manchester. In 1871 the Census shows him living in Cheetham with his wife and a servant.
Finally he returned to the States, some time after the Civil War was over, and died in Toronto in 1897. He wrote an autobiography - Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself - the first edition in Boston in 1849 and a later, revised edition, in Manchester in 1851.