Today’s community problems through a historical lens.

This week has seen the 50^th anniversary of the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr, the great American civil rights campaigner. His famous speech ‘I have a dream’ the day before his death is one of the iconic moments in American history. Dr King’s dream of equality that would be enjoyed by his children has not yet come true, despite great strides of progress that brought a black President to power in the USA.

In those days, I was involved in race and community relations at an international level and I was jointly responsible with the late Canon John Collins for organising a Memorial Service in St Paul’s Cathedral at which Coretta King, MLK’s widow, gave a passionate and moving address. It seems ironic that 50 years later more people have died violent deaths on the streets of London already this year than in New York and many of these have been linked with London’s black minority population.

Why is this? I have lived and worked in the ethnically mixed areas of London throughout my working life and I’m well aware of the complexities of social issues linked with poverty, deprivation, family breakdown, fatherlessness, gang life, poor education, low employment expectations and many other factors.

Anti-knife/gun protests in Hackney, Thursday 5 April 2018. See Photo Credits.

I understand the frustration and anger that brought residents out onto the street yesterday in Hackney with their demands for major policy changes to make the streets safe for their children – seven more people were stabbed in London last night!

But there is one outstanding factor that no politician and few social reformers want to touch. That is the legacy of slavery – especially to be found in communities with links to the Caribbean islands which suffered centuries of extreme cruelty under British colonial rule.

A Stain on British History

A new revelation in the past month has thrown fresh light on this subject, thanks to a Guardian article published just last week. It referred to a Treasury tweet (since withdrawn!) showing that when slavery in the British Caribbean was abolished in 1833 the British Government took out a huge loan to raise the £20 million required to accomplish the abolition.

That huge sum - £300 billion in today’s money - was needed to pay compensation: not to the slaves who had been captured in Africa, transported across the Atlantic and forced to work on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean islands, suffering indescribable cruelty, but to the owners of the slaves. Thousands of people in Britain were paid from this fund for the loss of their ‘property’, but not a penny was paid to the slaves themselves.

50 years on from Martin Luther King’s death, more people are dying on the streets of London than in New York.

That colossal injustice, a stain on our national history, has never been acknowledged in Britain. As a nation, for 200 years we have either ignored or carefully hidden our involvement in the slave trade and the extent to which British prosperity was built upon the proceeds of slavery. 

In 1800, seven years before the abolition of the slave trade, some two thirds of the British economy was said to be in some way linked with slavery and it undoubtedly fuelled the growth of the Industrial Revolution that prospered great cities such as Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol and London.

Generations of children in British schools, right up until 2007, were taught nothing about the slave trade. Any mention of slavery was usually taught in the context of the USA and slavery in the cornfields of the southern states of America, but never any mention of Barbados or Jamaica or Trinidad or the other Caribbean islands.

But the zenith of British hypocrisy and injustice has only just come to light.

The Price of Injustice

The great conspiracy of silence of our Government has only just been revealed in the Treasury tweet. It is that the massive loan raised to pay compensation to the people who owned slaves or shares in a slave plantation has taken nearly 200 years to be paid off and was only cleared three years ago, in 2015! And it was paid off by the Treasury using British taxpayers’ money!

This means that millions of people in Britain today have been paying to reward people who trafficked and abused thousands of human lives.

Millions of modern Brits have been paying to reward people who trafficked and abused thousands of human lives.

It is therefore an historical fact that the African Caribbeans who first began coming to Britain on the Empire Windrush in 1948 as ex-soldiers who had fought for Britain in the Second World War and were invited to come to help re-build our cities after the Blitz, have actually been paying for the freedom of their forebears.

A replica slave ship was sailed up the Thames to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, 2007.Generations of tax-paying Caribbeans in Britain have been contributing to paying off the money that was paid to white people in Britain who prospered from the suffering of their great-grandparents (who were not actually given their freedom until 1838, five years after the Act of Emancipation in Westminster).

This is the legacy of slavery that hangs over the Caribbean islands and the Caribbean community in Britain today. In 1838 slaves were given their freedom but there was no attempt to give them any compensation for their suffering or even any help to make a living! In all the years since then there has been no attempt to invest in schools or industry or community development, or any other means to stimulate prosperity for the people.

They have just been left to themselves to build their economies and to shape their societies by whatever means they could find in the modern, competitive, international world.

Quiet Cover-Up

This colossal injustice is part of the legacy of slavery that has been quietly covered by successive British governments and has only now become known through an accidental tweet from the Treasury.

It was actually in 2015, when the loan was finally cleared, that the British Prime Minister David Cameron visited Jamaica and promised to help – what was his promise? – to build a prison! No promise of help with economic or community development or educational grants – and of course, no mention of an apology for 300 years of enslavement!

This is the one great thing that our politicians will not do – say sorry! To say how much we, as a nation, deeply regret that period in our history when we enslaved our fellow human beings from Africa.

The one thing that our politicians will not do is say sorry!

 Let Justice Roll On!

One of the great truths that is revealed through the prophets in the Bible is that God hates injustice. The Prophet Amos thunders against those who despise the truth, who trample the poor, who oppress the righteous and take bribes, who deprive the poor of justice in the courts. He says: “Let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” (Amos 5:24).

The time has surely come not only to recognise the injustices of the past, but to do something in the present day: to see what measures can be taken to stimulate prosperity and well-being in the Caribbean islands and, most importantly, to consult community and church leaders in the Caribbean communities in Britain, to say how sorry we are as a nation for the injustices of the past, to listen to them and to take positive measures to deal with the complex social issues they face.

It is not enough to condemn knife crime or to bemoan the killings in London. We have to do something to deal with the real issues that no politician has so far had the courage to face.

Read The Guardian’s article here.

Issachar Ministries, our parent charity, is involved in a budding work to address the issues outlined in the article above, called the ‘Movement for Justice and Reconciliation’, or MJR. Click here to find out about the work that MJR is doing.