Category Archives: Slavery

He’s the MP with the Downton Abbey lifestyle. But the shadow of slavery hangs over the gilded life of Richard Drax

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The hardline Tory Brexiter’s family made a fortune from their Caribbean plantations where thousands died. Now he faces urgent calls for reparations

Drive into Dorset on the A31 and you roll past a high brick wall butted up tight to the road that seems to go on for ever. Every so often it doglegs at a monolithic gateway crowned by either a lion or a stag. This is the “great wall of Dorset” that runs for three miles, contains some 2m bricks and shields Charborough Park from the outside world. The wall creates an air of foreboding about what might lie inside. This is home to Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, the Conservative MP for South Dorset, who lives in the palatial Grade I-listed Charborough House, hidden from public view within the 283-hectare (700-acre) private grounds.

The park, with its outstanding garden and ancient deer park, is just a part of the 5,600 hectares of Charborough estate that makes Drax and his family the largest individual landowners in Dorset. The mainly 17th-century mansion, with its 36-metre (120ft) folly tower, is the model for Welland House in the Thomas Hardy novel Two on a Tower.

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Johns Hopkins was a slave owner, university reveals

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University, which has been at forefront of Covid-19 response, took pride in founder purportedly being an abolitionist

Johns Hopkins University, whose researchers have been at the forefront of the global response to Covid-19, announced on Wednesday that its founder owned slaves during the 19th century, a revelation for the Baltimore-based school that had taken pride in the man purportedly being a staunch abolitionist.

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Met police to compensate child slavery victim arrested after reporting ordeal

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Police ordered to pay £15,500 to man trafficked to UK from Vietnam as a boy who was detained and threatened with deportation

The Metropolitan police is to pay £15,500 to a victim of slavery who tried to report his traffickers but was instead arrested for immigration offences and sent to a detention centre.

The man, referred to in court as KQT, was 15 when he was taken by traffickers from Vietnam through Russia to the UK in a refrigerated lorry. He was arrested on arrival and placed in foster care, but shortly after was collected by his traffickers and forced to work on a cannabis farm, where he was locked inside a storeroom and only fed one meal a day. In January 2018, he escaped his captors and walked into a police station to report his ordeal.

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‘It can be uncomfortable’: how a New York farmhouse is facing its racist past

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In a new exhibition, three artists reckon with the history of slavery at the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum with a range of challenging pieces

When people think of buildings in Manhattan, chances are they think big and brash, cloud-piercing skyscrapers for tourists to marvel at.

But the borough is also home to the far more modest Dyckman Farmhouse, a white clapboard home built in 1765. It’s the oldest farmhouse in the city, and just off 204th Street in Inwood, once home to Dutch farmer William Dyckman, his family and their slaves.

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British Library apologises for linking Ted Hughes to slave trade

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The poet had been wrongly included among more than 300 figures whose collections were associated with wealth obtained from colonial violence

The British Library has apologised to Carol Hughes, the widow of the former poet laureate Ted Hughes, after it linked him to the slave trade through a distant ancestor.

Hughes’s name had been included on a spreadsheet from the library detailing more than 300 figures with “evidence of connections to slavery, profits from slavery or from colonialism”. Hughes’s link was through Nicholas Ferrar, who was born in 1592 and whose family was, the library said, “deeply involved” with the London Virginia Company, which was set up to colonise North America.

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Lin-Manuel Miranda: ‘Death suffuses my work, and part of that is growing up in New York’

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The acclaimed writer and performer on watching cat videos with ‘hot priest’ Andrew Scott, and why Hamilton reminds him of his own father

Lin-Manuel Miranda created and starred in the musical Hamilton, which premiered on Broadway in 2015. The show, about Alexander Hamilton, an American founding father, draws on hip-hop as well as more traditional musical forms, and won many awards, including 11 Tonys and the 2016 Pulitzer prize for drama. Miranda’s songs appear in the Disney animation Moana, he played Jack in Mary Poppins Returns and the balloonist Lee Scoresby in His Dark Materials, which returned to BBC One earlier this month.

How does Lee Scoresby’s character change in this series of His Dark Materials?
He goes all in on protecting Lyra. And it leads to some pretty wild places: it leads him out of the world in which he exists, to witches’ councils and beyond. In his short time with Lyra, he’s changed. He’s made the tactical decision that “my life is what it is, but this kid’s life could be better. We both were dealt a rotten pack of cards and I’m going to do what I can to make sure she’s got a brighter future.”

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Human rights must not be ‘trampled’ in global rush for PPE, say MPs

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Calls come after Guardian finds UK sourced PPE from factories in China where North Koreans work in modern slavery

MPs and experts in the procurement of personal protective equipment have said human rights must not be “trampled” in the rush to secure PPE for frontline workers via global supply chains.

The calls come after a Guardian investigation found evidence that the British government had sourced PPE from factories in China where hundreds of North Korean women have been secretly working in conditions of modern slavery.

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UK sourced PPE from factories secretly using North Korean slave labour

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Exclusive: Guardian investigation finds evidence that Chinese PPE factories supplying UK government are breaking UN sanctions

The British government has sourced PPE from factories in China where hundreds of North Korean women have been secretly working in conditions of modern slavery, according to evidence uncovered by the Guardian.

The Guardian’s findings indicate that hundreds of thousands of protective coveralls ordered for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) have come from factories using North Korean labour in the Chinese city of Dandong.

The three-month investigation has also found evidence of North Korean labour being used in factories exporting PPE to the US, Italy, Germany, South Africa, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Myanmar.

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Banking and slavery: Switzerland examines its colonial conscience

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BLM protests and fresh historical evidence are raising questions over the legacy of the founder of modern Switzerland, Alfred Escher

Alfred Escher wielded so much power and influence during his lifetime that he was nicknamed King Alfred I. An immense bronze statue of modern Switzerland’s founding father stands, fittingly, in front of Zurich’s main train station. Escher was a politician, but he was also an entrepreneur who founded the country’s railway network along with its leading university and the banking giant Credit Suisse.

The statue in Zurich has memorialised Escher for more than 100 years, but it may not be there much longer. A recently published study on Zurich’s involvement in slavery details problematic connections to Escher. The Escher dynasty owned a coffee plantation in Cuba with more than 80 slaves and Escher himself was involved in its sale.

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What’s in a name? How the legacy of slavery endures in Tunisia

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Black people in the north African country suffer hardship and disadvantage, and many still carry the label of ‘liberated’ slaves

Many within Tunisia greeted the news that 81-year-old Hamden Dali had won his two decade-long campaign to have “atig” removed from his name with little more than bemusement.

But for Dali atig – meaning “liberated by” – in his name was a painful reminder of his family’s heritage as former slaves.

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Man can drop part of name denoting slave ancestry, Tunisian court rules

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Case expected to open door for others wanting to drop ‘atig’ or ‘liberated by’ from their name

A court in Tunisia has allowed an 81-year-old man to remove a word from his name that marked him out as descended from slaves, in the country’s first ruling of its kind, his lawyer has said.

Tunisia abolished slavery in 1846, but critics say it has not done enough to address racism against black Tunisians, who make up 10-15% of the population and are mostly descended from slaves.

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How the long fight for slavery reparations is slowly being won

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In a suburb of Chicago, the world’s first government-funded slavery reparations programme is beginning. Robin Rue Simmons helped make it happen – but her victory has been more than 200 years in the making

It began with an email. On an especially cold day in Evanston, Illinois, in February 2019, Robin Rue Simmons, 43 years old and two years into her first term as alderman for the city’s historically Black 5th ward, sent an email whose effects would eventually make US history. The message to the nine-member equity and empowerment commission of the Evanston city council started with a disarmingly matter-of-fact heading: “Because ‘reparations’ makes people uncomfortable.”

She continued:

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British Museum removes founder’s statue over slavery links

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Hans Sloane ‘pushed off pedestal’ and placed with artefacts putting his work in context of British empire

The British Museum has removed a bust of its founding father, who was a slave owner, and said it wanted to confront its links to colonialism.

Hartwig Fischer, the institution’s director, revealed the likeness of Sir Hans Sloane has been placed in a secure cabinet alongside artefacts explaining his work in the context of the British empire.

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Tom Cotton calls slavery ‘necessary evil’ in attack on New York Times’ 1619 Project

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  • Republican gives interview to Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
  • Senator wants to ‘save’ US history from New York Times

The Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton has called the enslavement of millions of African people “the necessary evil upon which the union was built”.

Related: Trump aims barb at Reagan Foundation in fundraising coin kerfuffle

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Priti Patel criticised over comments on Leicester’s sweatshops

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Home secretary suggested officials ignored problem for fear of seeming racist

Priti Patel, the home secretary, has come under fire over claims that “cultural sensitivities” prevented a robust response to alleged worker exploitation in Leicester, with critics arguing cuts to regulators, the decision to limit inspections and an absence of unions were the biggest causes.

Ten days after the Guardian reported on fears that conditions in sweatshops were a factor in Leicester’s surge in coronavirus cases and resulting lockdown, reports emerged on Sunday that Patel was considering new laws to curb modern slavery.

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Thousands of potential trafficking victims ‘not given vital support’

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Less than fifth of those identified by Home Office as likely modern slavery victims are referred for legal and housing advice – study

Thousands of people identified as potential victims of trafficking in the UK have not been referred for support despite government pledges to help them, according to a new study.

Many victims of trafficking are hidden and unable to access support because they are under the control of those who are exploiting them. But victims who do come into contact with the authorities such as the police, Home Office or Gangmaster and Labour Abuse Authority (GLAA) which investigates reports of worker exploitation and human trafficking, should be referred for safe housing and legal advice.

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Germans know that toppling a few statues isn’t enough to confront the past | Géraldine Schwarz

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Britain should acknowledge that millions were complicit in the crimes of empire, just as Germans like my grandfather enabled nazism

Before the second world war, remembering history served only to glorify nations, to stir up revanchism or to sanctify heroes. Then Germany invented Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the attempt to deal with its Nazi shame by collectively confronting the unspeakable crimes of the Third Reich rather than evading them. This process, which started at the end of the 60s after two decades of collective amnesia, allowed something positive to grow from a negative legacy: Germany’s rehabilitation and reconstruction into one of the strongest democracies in the world.

Germany’s culture of remembrance could inspire countries such as Britain which have trouble understanding that in order to transform the weight of the past into wealth, it must confront history’s shadows – not ignore them.

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Protesters topple statue of Confederate general in Washington DC – video

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Protesters in Washington DC climbed up a bronze statue of Brig Gen Albert Pike and brought it down with ropes before setting it alight on Friday.  A US holiday known as Juneteenth that commemorates the end of slavery takes place every year on 19 June. Demonstrators took about an hour to fell the three-metre statue, as Juneteenth celebrations and anti-racist protests took place across the US. The police surrounded the area but did not appear to intervene

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Is this the end for colonial-era statues? – video

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Statues of colonialists and brutal leaders have been toppled by protesters or removed by governments in recent weeks as campaigns to bring down monuments to historical figures tainted by racism and slavery spread around the world.

In Belgium, during Black Lives Matter protests, numerous statues of King Leopold II, whose brutal rule of Congo caused an estimated 10 million deaths through murder, starvation and disease, were defaced and covered in red paint. While in the UK, Oxford University’s Oriel College voted in favour of removing its statue of the Victorian imperialist Cecil Rhodes.

In response to the latest action, the historian David Olusoga looks at the significance of these statues and examines the impact they have had on the victims of colonialists and imperialists, as well as the cost borne by their descendants

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Barclays, HSBC and Lloyds among UK banks that had links to slavery

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Many bank directors received compensation after slavery was made illegal in 1833

The slave trade was abolished in the British Empire in 1807 but it was not until 1833 that the Slavery Abolition Act finally banned the ownership of other human beings. However, 46,000 slave owners continued to benefit financially as the subsequent Slave Compensation Act provided £20m in payments – a sum worth billions in 2020 terms. Despite the name of the act, the former slaves were not compensated.

University College London’s Legacies of British Slave Ownership project shows that 10% to 20% of Britain’s wealthy can be identified as having had significant links to slavery. The amount of money borrowed to pay off slave owners was so large that the government only repaid it fully in 2015. Companies with links to slavery in their past include:

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