Amanpour and Company

Next, we turn to history and its aftermath.

Nearly two centuries after its abolition, reparations are long overdue for the descendants of the slave trade.

An historic move, former BBC journalist Laura Trevelyan and her family have recently publicly apologized for their ancestral ownership of over 1000 slaves on the Caribbean island of Grenada.

She says she will make a 100,000 pound donation and is now a full-time advocate for reparative justice.

Most recently she has requested apologies from the new King of England Charles and the British government for their ties to slavery.

Here she is with Michel Martin.

Michel: Thank you for talking with us.

Laura: It is a pleasure.

Thank you for the opportunity.

Michel: Your story is actually more common that I think a lot of people would like to admit.

The difference is that you are facing this story squarely and directly and talking about it publicly.

Let's start at the beginning of how you learned that your family had enslaved what, like 1000 people in Grenada?

Someplace you have never been.

How did you learn this?

Laura: Far more than 1000 over the years.

In 2013 in Britain, University College of London published a database which showed of the compensation which was paid to all of the people who owned slaves when slavery was abolished in Britain in 1833.

Why did the owners of the enslaved get compensation and not the enslaved?

The answer is that it was the only way Britain could get abolition through parliament, where there were many lawmakers who were themselves plantation owners in the West Indies.

This database of the 46,000 individuals who were paid compensation in 1834, immediately the database crashed.

It could not stand the volume and about 2016, someone in my family who had idly typed Trevelyan into the database emailed me.

I was supposedly the family historian, which had nothing of this and it because I didn't know.

This cousin emailed and said you wouldn't believe it.

Did you know that it says in the database that the Trevelyans got compensation from six different plantations and we owned more than 1000 slaves at the time of abolition?

Did you know that?

I said, I had no idea.

This cousin says this has changed our whole vision of my family.

What do you think?

Michel: What went through your mind?

Frankly, I would not be surprised if at the moment it was not very much at all.

It just is not the kind of thing that you pick up the phone and expect to hear.

Do you remember what went through your mind in the moment and subsequently?

Laura: I'm embarrassed to admit it was not anything mobile at all.

It was first of all, how embarrassing.

I wrote this book in 2006 and does not have it in it.

I would have to write it again.

Then, I thought this is shocking, it is appalling.

I thought that is a real story there.

All life is copied.

So, I thought this is a story that someday I have to look at it and think about it.

And then came 2020, that summer, living here in New York City, covering black lives matter, so many protests were in Brooklyn where I live and then I was forced to think that if the legacy of slavery in America is police violence towards black men, then what does this mean that my family, my ancestors were slaveowners in Grenada?

Not that far from where I am now.

Michel: Do you remember how that thought occurred to you?

I'm wondering if you think it was like the pilot light in the furnace, something that was on but you don't think about until you have to.

Laura: I think that is a good analogy, the pilot light.

The match lit a flame in 2016 and then it burned slowly.

I think in that summer of 2020, the flame began to burn a lot more brightly.

You know how it was that summer.

Those journalists being confronted with this reckoning in America.

It is not like I have not covered police brutality towards black men in the years since I lived in the states but it was the intensity of that summer and the way of which all aspects of American life and racism were being confronted.

And then I thought, here is the skeleton in the closet that I need to think about.

I began the process of asking BBC commissioning editors, could you commission a documentary?

Would you send me to Grenada?

Could this be part of the wider story?

In Britain, we are taught that the British abolished slavery in 1833, not that we were major participants in the slave trade.

The reckoning was happening in Britain just as it was in the U.S. and across the world.

It took a while to persuade everybody that this was something that was worth doing.

My commissioning editor at the BBC said if you go, you have to ask the question should I pay reparations?

You cannot go unless you ask that question of everyone you meet in Grenada.

I got to go with a fantastic young Haitian-American producer, herself a descendant of the enslaved in Haiti.

We went on this journey together to Grenada last year.

Michel: What was it like when you landed?

What went through your mind?

Laura: Really extraordinary.

The first thing we did was land and go to one of the largest former sugarcane plantations on the item -- on the island.

Beautiful location with a huge plantation house.

It is not the original house but it looks like something from the movies, what you would think I sugarcane plantation would look like.

These sloping hills, ancient buildings where the sugarcane factories were.

I looked at this place which was so beautiful and so terrible.

I felt a shiver going down my spine and you can just imagine the picture with the slave master and the big house with the enslaved at the bottom of the slopes.

It was so hot.

Just thinking of people toiling away and the machetes.

I met a Grenadian historian there.

He said, think of it, here we are.

Me a descendant of the slaves and you a descendant of slaveowners.

Think of that.

The weight of the moment just really hit both of us under that blue Caribbean sky and that hot sun.

It was like we were back up 200 years.

Michel: But you weren't, though.

I'm wondering what that was.

Did it make you feel what?

Complicit?

Did it make you feel guilty?

Laura: Not guilty because it was not me but the sense that this is part of Britain's past and part of Britain's wealth that was accumulated here in these sugarcane plantations of the Caribbean and that it is unacknowledged really.

That is what hit me.

So few British people are taught the extent of the slave trade and the legacy of it as well.

The fact this was a system of wealth extraction.

That is what we talked about, how the enslaved got absolutely nothing when slavery ended apart from working from free -- working for free.

That was part of the deal in Britain's Parliament.

Not only did the slaveowners get compensation but their workforce had to work for them for free for another few years.

The Caribbean is left with this legacy of illiteracy, poverty, a emancipation.

There was so much that I learned when I was there about how the past doesn't form the present.

Michel: The question was put to you, not just now that you know about this, the other question is what are you going to do about it?

You are in fact doing something about it.

You and your family, mainly you, are in fact paying reparations.

Tell me about that.

Laura: Yeah, so, the chair of the reparations commission and the author of "Britain's Black Debt."

He is one of the authors of the 10 point reparations plan.

That plan begins with -- this is a request to the former colonial powers.

It is not a request to individual families but we used it as a guide.

Point number one is an apology.

The importance of an apology.

And then the plan calls for debt relief, investment in health and regulations because with the wealth, it is extraction, there was no chance to invest in health or education.

The Caribbean has been playing catch-up forever.

We use this as a bit of a guide for ourselves and we worked with Grenada's national reparations committee.

The Vice Chair of that committee , I worked closely with her to figure out what was the best thing to do and talk to many family members and tried -- you can imagine what that is like.

104 family members signed our letter of apology that we delivered.

Not all family members had very much money or were in a position to give.

People are giving what they can.

I am giving 100,000 pounds.

We settled on education and the University of the West Indies has a fund in Grenada for mature students.

That is something we are giving money to.

Also, a rural charity for schoolchildren in Grenada which comes with the cost of getting to school, school buses, and school supplies.

They seemed like very practical things.

One of the legacies was illiteracy and the education cap.

-- gap.

This seemed like it was important to fund.

Michel: I can imagine there are people on both sides.

There are some who would say you are crazy.

That is your pension.

You have earned that.

What are you doing?

I imagine there are other people who would say that is never enough and it is purely performative and therefore, meaningless.

I don't know if you engage with either of those perspectives but if you do, what do you think about it?

Laura: For sure.

When we went to Grenada, that question was asked a lot.

This is not very much a lot of money, is it?

Your ancestors got 3 million pounds when slavery was abolished and who knows how much of the sale of sugarcane?

The answer is that no amount of money can possibly be enough for the horror to compensate.

Enslavement in the Caribbean resulted in the population dropping.

The number of people, there was no natural population growth.

There was a population decline because of the brutality and hideous conditions.

Money can't make up for that but what I hope -- yes, you are right, the attack comes from the left and right.

The right is when will this end?

Going to apologize for everything forever?

Then, the left goes this is meaningless, pr, etc.

Hilary persuaded us that if we became the first British family whose ancestors were slaveowners to publicly apologize, you will set an example, you will encourage others to follow and you will help a little bit to fill that void that we have in the Caribbean where we don't know our history all we know is our ancestors were kidnapped from Africa and dumped in the Caribbean.

You are actually part of our history and it has been a deafening silence from descendants of slaveowners for obvious reasons.

People are scared of the reaction.

But, it will be part of the healing process.

Even though it will be painful and turbulent, it is important to do it.

I've been contacted by a number of families since our apology, whose ancestors were slaveowners in Jamaica, Barbados, who have said how did you do this?

How can we do this?

We want to acknowledge this painful past but we don't know how.

Can you help?

I have said what we did.

In a way, the Caribbean is straightforward.

These are these reparations committees on the islands.

Our people you can talk to who want to talk to you about it.

Michel: What other observations do you have between the conversation in the U.K. and the conversation in the U.S.?

As a person who has been a reporter in both the U.K. and U.S. for some time, what do you notice about the difference in the way these things are discussed?

Laura: One of the things that nobody really says which are true, is that American slavery was British slavery.

Until America was independent, the enslaved were brought here by the British.

America was a British colony.

There was no distinction between American slavery and British slavery so that is one thing.

I was taught in school that the British abolished slavery way before those terrible Americans.

Those terrible Americans were actually us before they were independent.

There is that.

We have just seen now the Guardian newspaper uncovering the fact that the royal family profited from it, which you would expect.

The Duke of York ran the Royal African company and later became king of England.

There's as long and deep link.

Rinse Harry in his book makes a passing reference to the fact the wealth of the world -- royal family is partly built on the backs of the enslaved.

Only now are we seeing them acknowledge this with the death of the Queen, a new generation.

King Charles who is King of the Commonwealth and confirmed the royal family is supporting academic research.

It is long overdue but it is important and significant.

It is part of this long-overdue process we are talking about of acknowledgment which is only the beginning.

Michel: Drawing upon your long experience in the U.S., what do you make of this argument that this makes white people feel bad?

And that these kinds of conversations cannot be had because they make white people feel bad, especially white children?

This is something that we have been hearing in these very raucous school board meetings where people are demanding the removal of certain books and ideas and courses from the curricula.

It induces guilt and therefore it is bad.

What do you say to people who say that?

Laura: I think it is important to acknowledge the pain of the past.

And to be honest about it.

It is painful but you don't want to make white children feel guilty for what their ancestors did and nor should that be the aim or do I think it is the aim for many of these programs.

It is hard to talk about difficult issues honestly.

It is really important to do it.

Think it is a question of the tone that you use really.

Michel: Laura Trevelyan, thank you for speaking with us today.

Laura: Thank you so much.