Brent Residents & former Pupils of WGHS committed to the removal of Gladstone’s name from the Park in our Borough still bearing his name

Ethical Name Change Open Letter
Please consider signing and sharing this Open Letter for “No Gladstone in the Park”
WIlliam Gladstone’s maiden speech to Parliament was in defence of Slavery. He believed enslaved workers should undergo some form of “civilisation” process before emancipation and when abolition was finally agreed, he negotiated the equivalent of £14m “compensation” for his father. 124 years after his death his name needs to be removed.

We, the undersigned Concerned Citizens and Community Activists demand an unreserved apology from Councillor Milli Patel, Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Finance, Resources & Reform

… Read the rest...

A stained-glass church window dedicated to a trafficker in enslaved Africans, Edward Colston, is to be replaced.
St Mary Redcliffe Church, in Bristol, removed four stained-glass panels dedicated to the memory of the 17th-century enslaver.

Permission for the windows to be replaced has been granted by the Church of England’s court in Bristol. In his judgement Justin Gau, chancellor of the Diocese of Bristol, said: “The Church of England and the historical behaviour of this parish church in excusing the life of Colston have a journey of repentance to make. To excuse or ignore the slave trade is a sin“.

Edward Colston was a senior figure in the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans. He made his fortune trading … Read the rest...

In person in the House of commons and on Zoom
Meeting ID: 89239346459, Passcode: Lobby0101

So far, so good.
The Church Commissioners’ Research Into Historic Links To Transatlantic Chattel Slavery is a considerable step forward. It is a remarkable piece of research, accountants have gone through the records of a fund known as “Queen Anne’s Bounty” with a fine tooth comb. This fund used incomes from two sources of tithes [compulsory taxes used to fund the Established Church] to augment the incomes of poorer clergy in the Church of England, in some cases by buying land upon which the clergyman concerned could make a living, in other cases by using profits made from investments made by the Church in the South Sea Company.
As Dr Helen Paul, one of the historical advisers to the research … Read the rest...

British slave owners’ family to apologise and pay reparations
An aristocratic British family is to make history by travelling to the Caribbean and publicly apologising for its ownership of more than 1,000 enslaved Africans. The Trevelyan family, which has many notable ancestors, is also paying reparations to the people of Grenada, where it owned six sugar plantations.
In 1835, the Trevelyan family received £26,898, a huge sum at the time, in compensation from the British government for the abolition of slavery a year earlier.
A £100,000 fund, donated by the New York-based BBC correspondent Laura Trevelyan, will be formally launched in Grenada on 27 February by Sir Hilary Beckles, chair of the CARICOM Reparations Commission, and Trevelyan family members.
Nicole … Read the rest...

Christopher Codrington, a former Fellow of All Souls, died in 1710, leaving a bequest of £10,000 to the College for building a new library and stocking it with books; this new library became generally known as the Codrington Library, although that name was never formally adopted by the Statutes of the College. Codrington’s wealth derived largely from his family’s activities in the West Indies, where they owned plantations worked by enslaved people of African descent.
The College has taken several steps to address the problematic nature of the Codrington legacy.
It has erected a memorial plaque at the entrance to the Library, ‘In memory of those who worked in slavery on the Codrington plantations in the West Indies’.
In 2020 … Read the rest...

Why the Museum of the Home must remove the statue of Robert Geffrye and make reparations
by Steve Cushion
published by Hackney Stand Up To Racism and Caribbean Labour Solidarity

Single copies: £4 plus £1.50 post and packing.
Email orders to publications@hackneysutr.org

The debate over the statue of Sir Robert Geffrye (1613–1703) outside the Museum of the Home in Hackney has opened a window onto the slave trade and its role in the creation of modern Britain. As a successful London businessman and politician, Geffrye’s life well illustrates the early development of capitalism in England and the relationship between the City of London and the origins of imperialism, particularly the importance of the whole business of slavery.

Diane Abbott MP, … Read the rest...

The Final Report has been published. It has seriously irritated the Daily Telegraph, which alone is promising.
The research looked into the ways in which the University may have been involved financially and otherwise in the slave trade or other historical forms of coerced labour connected to colonialism, and the University’s contribution to knowledge that may have supported the validation and dissemination of racialised and racist social structures and beliefs. Given the University of Cambridge’s role as an educational institution, this latter point is important and often overlooked.
Here are some extracts from the report.
Engagement in ownership of or trade in enslaved people
While we have not seen any evidence that Cambridge institutions directly owned any plantations that … Read the rest...

The small village of Champagney just to the south of the Vosges mountains in Eastern France has a museum called the “Maison de la Négritude et des Droits de l’Homme”. Champagney, in 1789 during the lead up to the French Revolution, was the first town in France to raise a petition against both the traffic in slaves and the practice of enslavement in the French colonies. It started by saying “The inhabitants and community of Champagney cannot think of the ills suffered by the Negroes in the colonies, without having their hearts penetrated by the deepest pain, by imagining their fellows, still united to them by the double bond of Religion, being treated harder than beasts of burden…“. … Read the rest...

When the Master of Jesus College, University of Cambridge tried to obtain the removal of the statue of Tobias Rustat from the college chapel because of his links to the slave trade, the request was turned down by a Church court, which found that widespread opposition to the memorial was based on what they called “a false narrative” about the scale of the financial rewards Rustat gained from slavery, and ordered that the memorial should remain in the chapel. The judgement was made by the deputy chancellor of the diocese of Ely, David Hodge QC, who said the removal of the Rustat memorial would cause “considerable or notable harm to the significance of the chapel as a … Read the rest...