Friday briefing: One year on from the Guardian’s look at its historic connections to slavery

Cotton Capital illustration including an extract from 'The Bill of sales of Negro slaves, 1774-1872' from South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia. Illustration: Guardian Design

Good morning.

In the wake of the global Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the Scott Trust, the Guardian’s owner, commissioned a report by an independent academic expert to investigate the links between the founder of what was then the Manchester Guardian and transatlantic slavery. Criticism was mounting at institutions that needed to interrogate their possible links to the slave trade. After almost two centuries, the time had come for the Guardian to face its history.