<p><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: #a0a0a0; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"> </span></span></p><div style="text-shadow: #4c4c4c 0px 0px 1px; text-align: justify; padding: 0px; margin: 0px;">I have two wishes for 2010 and the first is that we all join forces to raise sufficient money for a memorial of Mary Seacole on the site donated by St Thomas’ hospital in London. It will be a 10 foot bronze statue, lit at night and visible from across Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament. My second is that journalists writing about Seacole should at least check what she actually said about black people.<br style="text-shadow: #4c4c4c 0px 0px 1px;" /></div><div style="text-shadow: #4c4c4c 0px 0px 1px; text-align: justify; padding: 0px; margin: 0px;"><br style="text-shadow: #4c4c4c 0px 0px 1px;" /></div><div style="text-shadow: #4c4c4c 0px 0px 1px; text-align: justify; padding: 0px; margin: 0px;">I have to refute Tony Sewell’s assertion that ‘there is no evidence that Mary Seacole had any sympathy for the plight of the black masses’ (Voice, December 7). Reading her 1857 autobiography, the ‘Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands’, yes she did use the ‘N’ word, twice in speaking to Americans.<br style="text-shadow: #4c4c4c 0px 0px 1px;" /></div><div style="text-shadow: #4c4c4c 0px 0px 1px; text-align: justify; padding: 0px; margin: 0px;"><br style="text-shadow: #4c4c4c 0px 0px 1px;" /></div><div style="text-shadow: #4c4c4c 0px 0px 1px; text-align: justify; padding: 0px; margin: 0px;">Whilst this understandably causes shockwaves when read today, she did not use the word in a derogatory way. In her autobiography Seacole also describes how racist American women negatively used the word against her in demanding that she get off a boat about to sail to Jamaica. Otherwise in her book Seacole uses the words ‘black’, ‘creole’, ‘negro’ or ‘coloured’.</div><p> </p>
