New film about Benjamin Lay
'Becoming Benjamin Lay', directed by Tony Buba, will be screened on 17 April
Friends House is to screen a new film about the radical Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay.
Becoming Benjamin Lay, directed by Tony Buba, will be screened on 17 April in the Benjamin Lay room. The film examines Lay’s activism, his dwarfism and how his body shaped his politics, and ‘the reasons his story became largely forgotten’.
The film will be introduced by Marcus Rediker, professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh, who produced the film and wrote the book, The Fearless Benjamin Lay.
Quaker Justin Meggitt, professor at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, is writing a critical edition of Lay’s 1738 book All Slave-Keepers that Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates with Marcus Rediker (to be published next year). He told the Friend: ‘We are doing a modern edition of this book as a lot of Quakers and others are now interested in Lay but his book is challenging for a modern reader who does not know the historical context or religious ideas that shape it. Lay’s opposition to slavery is very unusual in all kinds of ways. It is not just his dramatic actions and the way he used his body in his protests – a form of non-violent direct action ahead of its time – but he was also working-class, a sailor, autodidact, and someone who wasn’t part of the Quaker establishment that supported slavery. He’s a very different voice, but he’s still a Quaker voice.’
Other things modern Quakers would resonate with now, said Justin Meggitt, are Lay’s thoughts on animal rights, the death penalty, gender equality, and attacks on consumption. Lay’s book was written not long after the death of Sarah Smith Lay, his abolitionist wife, a Quaker minister and another person of short stature, who shaped Lay’s thoughts and whose voice can be heard in the book – along with that of some enslaved people.
As a professor of religion, Justin says, ‘The reason I became interested in Lay is because he uses a lot of powerful language from the Book of Revelation to condemn Quaker enslavers as satanic. For Friends that probably makes them feel very uncomfortable, although Lay always allows for the possibility of their redemption. But it is such an unusual take to see the Book of Revelation as an attack on slavery, it made me think again about language that a modern person might shy away from. This kind of language can be very powerful if you’re trying to confront something that is so horrific. Lay obviously had PTSD from what he had seen of the brutality of slavery in the sugar plantations of Barbados and found it impossible to accept a practice that had become normalised among Friends.’
Marcus Rediker will also introduce the film screenings at Central Bristol Meeting House on 23 April, as part of Bristol’s Radical History Festival 2026, and in Cambridge on 1 May.
