The great-great-grandson of 19th-century British Prime Minister William Gladstone said he was horrified to learn that his ancestors were slave owners in Jamaica and Guyana. And former BBC journalist Laura Trevelyan said she learned after records of Britain’s Slave Compensation Commission were put online that one of her ancestors, Sir John Trevelyan, owned sugar cane plantations in Grenada.
They spoke at a meeting at U.N. headquarters in New York this past week. For the first time, descendants of slave owners and enslaved people in former British colonies in the Caribbean sat at the same table with diplomats and experts from those nations discussing reparations.
The Geneva-based Human Rights Council has called for global action for years, including reparations, apologies and educational reforms to make amends for racism against people of African descent. The Caribbean Community, known as CARICOM, has a 10-point plan for reparatory justice, starting with demands for European countries where enslaved people were kept and traded to issue formal apologies.
At the meeting on Tuesday, Trevelyan spoke of her family’s decision to apologize to Grenada and to make a contribution of 100,000 British pounds (about $133,000) toward education in the Caribbean island nation. Going to Grenada with family and apologizing “wasn’t exactly smooth sailing,” said Trevelyan. There were protests by a group that thought the apology was inadequate and the money was not enough.
https://apnews.com/article/slaves-owners-justice-reparations-britain-caribbean-7e38ec2efbbb3ee57a8891daa417ca2f