Joseph Jackson Fuller

Joseph Jackson Fuller was  born 29 June 1825 into an enslaved family in Spanish Town, Jamaica.

In the year after the abolition of slavery and the ending of the apprenticeship system in Jamaica in 1838, Joseph’s father Alexander McLoud Fuller, a skilled carpenter and active member of his Baptist community, formed part of a reconnaissance trip to West Africa to explore the possibility of setting up a mission. Four years later in 1843, Joseph, aged 18, together with 36 others embarked on the hazardous three months voyage from Jamaica to West Africa to set up a Baptist mission.

Ordained in April 1859, Joseph spent 43 years in West Africa (1845-1888) as a missionary for the Baptist Missionary Society, and is credited with building and sustaining much of that Society's work in that area until it was ended by German colonial expansion.

Married three time, and father to seven children surviving infancy, Joseph  visited the UK for the first time in 1869, travelling to visit his wife’s family in Norfolk.

After the end of his missionary work in West Africa, he settled in Sydner Road, Stoke Newington, attending the Devonshire Road Baptist Chapel Hackney. During this time, he toured as a successful and popular speaker, with thousands attending to hear him speak. His address to the Baptist Union in Cambridge was reproduced in Black Voices: The Shaping of Our Christian Experience,  an anthology compiled by David Killingray and Joel Edwards that highlights the experiences of black Christians in Britain.

Joseph Fuller died on 11 December 1908, and was buried at here at Abney Park, with other Baptists who worked for the same cause and some of whom he met in his youth, including Thomas Burchell and Samuel Oughton (see Self-guided tour: Voices from Abney Park - Abolitionists — Abney Park)