An Evening With Barack Obama

The Obama Manchester cotton workers tribute came at the close of An Evening With Barack Obama, where tens of thousands of people packed Co-op Live on Thursday to hear the former US president interviewed by the writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch. The 90-minute event was punctuated by cheers, whoops, laughter and applause from the audience, and it ended with Obama turning to the city's own history.

The Lancashire cotton famine and the letter to Lincoln

Obama told the crowd about the Lancashire cotton famine, when workers from Manchester and surrounding towns supported Abraham Lincoln's blockade of cotton from enslaving Confederate states. In 1862, during the American civil war, the union blockade stopped cotton leaving the South, even though the workers' livelihoods depended on it.

According to Obama, business people, manufacturers and the Guardian all opposed the blockade. But over at the Free Trade Hall, he said, a gathering of hungry British working workers chose to back those fighting for freedom.

• The workers wrote a letter to Lincoln to express their support.
• Lincoln wrote back, commending them for what Obama described as a historic expression of Christian humility and charity, and grace.

The Guardian's own Cotton Capital series, launched in 2023 to explore its founders' links to the cotton trade and transatlantic enslavement, forms part of the same history Obama was invoking.

A story to pass on

Obama called the episode a wonderful story and said it offered an example for today. He suggested that people could draw on it in their own moment: "if they could do it, why can't we?"

He told the audience that if such stories were told to each other and passed on to children and grandchildren, that would help people get through current times.

Race, democracy and the Obama Presidential Center

The conversation also turned to race and democracy in America. Obama said race is a faultline of so much of American history, pointing to compromises that tacitly ratified slavery and to a civil war fought to secure a more inclusive notion of who 'we the people' are.

Reflecting on his own election, Obama said his identity was reflected in his politics in ways particular to the United States and in ways that were more universal. He said he became, in his view, a symbol of the journey the country took - not to a post-racial America, but marking a moment when 'we the people' seemed to mean all people. His election, he added, did not erase the institutional, structural legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, but it signified that change was possible.

Democracy, he told Hirsch, is a journey that requires continual replenishment to avoid falling back into old ways amid economic, social and technological disruptions. People tend to forget, he said, how recently democracy has taken hold and how fragile it is: for millennia societies were organised around caste and hierarchy, violence and force.

Hirsch spoke of the huge impact Obama's 2008 A More Perfect Union speech had had, including for her as a black British person of mixed heritage.

Obama also discussed the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, a museum, library and education project, and the wider work of his foundation, which is committed to challenging economic inequality, the climate crisis, education and health, with programmes for women and girls, global emerging leaders and journalists in oppressive regimes. He said the centre was about reminding people what was possible.

On current affairs, Obama said it was a good thing for the prime minister and Andy Burnham to have the Ukrainian president Zelenskyy in Manchester, to remind people what's at stake.