A BBC reporter is giving £100,000 or more than $120,000 to a community in Grenada after learning that her slave-owning family was compensated when slavery was abolished.
British reporter Laura Trevelyan told the BBC on Feb. 4 her family owned six sugar plantations in Grenada until slavery was abolished in 1833. Trevelyan revealed that she would donate the funds to help establish a fund for economic development in the community.
“The Trevelyan family is apologizing to the people of Grenada for the role our ancestors played in enslavement on the island, and engaging in reparations,” she wrote.
Trevelyan visited the country back in 2022 and said that she was ashamed to learn how the enslaved were treated by her ancestors. She also said she felt duty-bound to do something about it.
“It was really horrific,” said Trevelyan. “When I saw for myself the plantations where slaves were punished, when I saw the instruments of torture that were used to restrain them, when I looked at the neck braces, at the manacles, at the system of dehumanization that my family had profited from as absentee slave-owners of these sugar plantations, I felt ashamed.”
“I also felt that it was my duty, you can’t repair the past — but you can acknowledge the pain and that I wanted to do something to make it better.”
Trevelyan added that seven members of her family would be going to Grenada to issue a formal public apology.
Trevelyan also revealed that her family received £34,000 or $41,000 in 1834 after slavery was abolished as reparations for their loss of “property.” The UK…
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