I remember the moment. We were meeting the historians who had been commissioned by the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian, to look into our past. The Black Lives Matter movement had put unprecedented focus on racism in our societies, and it had inspired the Guardian to look at itself. Dr Cassandra Gooptar, an irrepressible expert on the history of enslaved peoples, had done some early work, and the evidence was inescapable: there was no doubt that the Guardian was founded with money partly derived from slavery, and the links were extensive. David Olusoga, one of Britain’s top historians who happens to sit on the Scott Trust, was not surprised; this history had, in many ways, been hiding in plain sight. As editor-in-chief of the Guardian, I felt sick to my stomach.
It is a deeply uneasy feeling to know that one of my predecessors, the Guardian’s founding editor, John Edward Taylor, derived much of his wealth from Manchester’s cotton industry, an industry that relied on firms such as Taylor’s trading with cotton plantations in the Americas that had enslaved millions of Black people forcibly transported from Africa. The great American abolitionist Frederick Douglass made the connection plain: “The price of human flesh on the Mississippi was regulated by the price of cotton in Manchester.”
The Manchester Guardian was founded in 1821 in the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre, with an inspiring mission arguing for the right of working people to have parliamentary representation and for the expansion of education to the poor. It was in favour of the abolition of slavery.
Yet Taylor, and most of those who lent him money to found the Guardian, profited from cotton, a global industry that was reliant on the systematic enslavement of millions. One of Taylor’s backers was not only a cotton merchant but also co-owner of a sugar plantation in Jamaica where 122 people were enslaved. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that these interests may have influenced the paper’s editorial policy. In 1833, when the enslavers demanded a huge payout for giving up their human “property”, a Guardian editorial supported them, arguing: “We are convinced, that no plan for the abolition of slavery could have been worthy … which was not based on the great principles of justice to the planter [that is, the enslaver] as well as to the slave.” Justice to the planter meant a share in a massive £20m gifted by the state; justice to the enslaved meant only freedom, with not a penny in compensation.
These facts, laid out plainly in the Legacies of Enslavement report, published by the Scott Trust today, are horrifying. “Different times” is no excuse for chattel slavery, a crime against humanity.
The truth, which has gone largely undiscussed in Britain for the past 200 years but has been powerfully laid out in recent books by Olusoga, Sathnam Sanghera and others, is that huge portions of the wealth generated during Britain’s era of empire, and the Industrial Revolution, are inextricably linked to transatlantic slavery in the Caribbean, the US, South America and beyond.
We have been investigating this issue for more than two years and have spent that time tormented by big questions. How could these founders have been reformists – indeed, abolitionists – yet happily derive money from slavery? We know that meeting halls in Manchester were packed with crowds listening to talks by African American abolitionists such as Douglass and Sarah Parker Remond. And why is there nothing about the links to slavery in the extensive histories of the Guardian? Why was this issue not considered until now, even under the editorship of CP Scott, who turned the Guardian to the anticolonial left and swept away so much that was unappealing about the 19th-century newspaper?
For those of us responsible for the Guardian in the present day, the biggest question is about now. What do we do, now that we have this knowledge? How should this information change us as an organisation?
I have discussed these questions at length with colleagues in recent months.
It is absolutely right that we apologise for our past, as the Scott Trust is doing today, and that we build relationships with descendant communities where our founders had these connections. The trust will devote funds to community programmes in Jamaica and in the Sea Islands in the US over the next decade, and will fund further research into these histories, including researching the founders of the Observer.
But the legacy of slavery has not been felt only in the Americas. It has played a role – some say the defining role – in creating the racism and inequality that persists today, in many societies and in many industries, including in journalism. As a media organisation, the Guardian will redouble its efforts to change representation in our sector.
The Guardian is home to many fantastic Black journalists, editors and columnists, and we can and will be more diverse. I believe diversity is a practical as well as a moral imperative for news organisations: as I wrote in 2017, “if journalists become distant from other people’s lives, they miss the story, and people don’t trust them”. Yet studies have shown that just 0.2% of journalists in the UK are Black (despite Black people constituting about 3% of the overall population, with people of colour more broadly making up 18%). Britain’s media, including the Guardian, must work harder to recruit, retain and elevate people of colour into leadership roles and to create an inclusive environment.
The Guardian has long been committed to international reporting, from every continent, to our global audience. We will do more, and in particular we will do more to report meaningfully on Black communities across the world. Over the next 12 months we will create new reporting roles based in the Caribbean. We will add to our teams in South America and Africa. And in the UK and US, we will hire more journalists to focus on the lives and experiences of people of colour. There are stories that aren’t being told, and the Guardian is well placed to tell them.
I’m pleased that the Scott Trust is also funding an expansion of the Guardian Foundation’s outstanding journalism bursary scheme. For several decades the scheme has supported many talented young journalists into media careers, with some holding positions at the Financial Times, the BBC, Channel 4, Bloomberg, the New York Times and the Guardian. The scheme will be expanded in the UK and extended to our editions in the US and Australia.
Getting more Black journalists in at entry level is important; so too is keeping them in the industry and ensuring they reach the highest levels, where representation is poor. We are therefore also allocating funding to develop a new mid-career development and leadership scheme for Black journalists.
Most immediately, today we launch Cotton Capital, a new journalism series covering the Guardian’s own history in the context of Britain’s broader historical links with enslavement. Over the next few months, through essays, interactive journalism, video, podcasts and newsletters, we will explore this history, the politics surrounding it and the impact it still has today. We will publish a special supplement in print with our newspaper this Saturday for UK readers, including features and essays by some of the world’s best thinkers on race and history.
My hope is that the Guardian’s reckoning with its past will inspire other institutions to do the same; that Britain can start to atone for a national scar that is deeply unexamined yet is all around us; and that out of that we can continue to build a new, more modern national identity based on a true acknowledgment of our past, a true understanding of the source of the nation’s wealth, and an honest self-image.
The writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin said: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” For the Guardian, we are facing up to, and apologising for, the fact that our founder and those who funded him drew their wealth from a practice that was a crime against humanity. In Olusoga’s words: “Within the financial DNA of the Guardian are the stolen labour and lives of enslaved people in the United States, Jamaica and Brazil.” As we enter our third century as a news organisation, that awful history must reinforce our determination to use our journalism to expose racism, injustice and inequality, and to hold the powerful to account; to use clarity and imagination, to inspire hope.
• Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
• The Guardian’s founders and transatlantic slavery: what should it mean? Join the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, the historian David Olusoga, the lead researcher Dr Cassandra Gooptar, and the Cotton Capital editor Maya Wolfe-Robinson for a special event as they discuss the Guardian’s two-year investigation into its founders’ links to the cotton trade and enslaved people. Chaired by the Guardian journalist Joseph Harker. Register here to join on Thursday 30 March, 7pm BST (2pm EDT)
