“Fighting slavery’s legacy of racism through transformative education” was the theme of this year’s International Day of Remembrance of the Victims ofâ¯Slaveryâ¯and the Transatlantic Slave, held last Saturday.
It was a fitting context for the Mayor of London to announce plans to create a newâ¯memorialâ¯in London dedicated to the victims of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
While the plans are at an early stage, what will hopefully follow offers us long overdue time and space for Londoners to have deep, painful, contentious, creative and hopefully healing conversations. It will help to increase knowledge and understanding across our city, which remains embroiled in the legacies and scandals of slavery to this very day.
People’s consciences might be eased through selective memory about the origins of what still helps maintain London’s global powerhouse status, but the proceeds of slavery are everywhere.
Documented sources remain sparse about the precise number of men, women and children victims who died in the raids and wars that led to their captivity, or who survived only to be transported to the Americas as chattel and goods to support our current socio-economic system; a system which was based on the exploitation of Africans through coercion and violence.
Some suggest that we should move on from remembering the at least 18 million Africans who were dehumanised to create wealth and add further injury by suggesting that we should not mention intergenerational cultural trauma and distress experienced.
A few years ago, I traced Edward Gray (1751-1838) through University College London’s Legacy of Slavery website. A linen merchant and Quaker who enslaved my maternal grandmother’s (Adelaide Gray) family in Portland, Jamaica. He received over £750,000 compensation in today’s money in 1835 for over 250 enslaved Africans.
The riches he accrued from the slave trade during his lifetime also allowed him to build Harringay House (14 bedrooms on almost 200 acres in North London) and to amass an art collection worth over £2m in today’s money.
The deeply uncomfortable connections reverberate as I go about my domestic and working life in Haringey, where I now live. What would I on behalf of my family want to say to him today? What would I expect of him?
I experienced real pain when I heard that the £300m (in today’s money) reparations debt which the UK government paid to slave owners in 1833 was only paid off in 2015 and the realisation that I might have had to contribute to this through my taxes.
Local historians seemed to have delved into and collected evidence of Gray’s slave trading activities including human beings in his material goods, however these stories remain hidden from public view.
It’s important we re-examine all of our public realm to find more opportunities for diverse representation and to tell stories which more closely reflect the history and present lives of all Londoners.
Our local Black Boy Lane, originally named after a pub with a caricature of a Black Boy was recently renamed John La Rose Lane after the founder of New Beacon Books, the first specialist Caribbean publishing company in Britain.
Some may argue that memorials are not enough, and I agree they have limitations. However the memorial to the victims of the Transatlantic Slave Trade will help to bring previously untold stories to light. It should add energy and interesting perspectives and momentum to the debate about reparatory justice, which I hope to see happen in my lifetime.
