City Readers Digital Historic Collections at the New York Society Library

Ignatius Sancho (c. 1729 – 14 December 1780) was a British composer, actor, and writer. He is the first known Briton of African heritage to vote in a British election. He gained fame in his time as "the extraordinary Negro", and to eighteenth-century British abolitionists he became a symbol of the humanity of Africans and immorality of the slave trade. The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, edited and published two years after his death, is one of the earliest accounts of African slavery written in English by a former slave of Spanish and English families.