BBC News presenter Laura Trevelyan resigns from corporation to campaign for more reparations in the Caribbean

A BBC presenter whose family paid reparations for slavery has left the corporation to campaign for more payments to the Caribbean.

Laura Trevelyan, 54, announced in February that her family would donate £100,000 to help community projects in Grenada to offset their slave holdings on the island.

Ms Trevelyan said she will leave the BBC to become a “roving advocate” for restorative justice. She said she will help campaigns seeking apologies and financial reparations from former colonial powers.

The British journalist, who is based in the US, said she would work with the likes of Clive Lewis, the Labor MP, who this month urged the prime minister to enter negotiations with Caribbean leaders over reparations for the role of Gran Britain in slavery.

Ms Trevelyan, who last year appeared in the documentary Grenada: Confronting the Past, said the daily telegraph now was an ideal time to work. She said: “The king’s coronation and his comments about being ready to talk about the legacy of slavery provide an opportunity for a broader discussion.”

In addition to broader campaign work, he will also “work with families in similar positions to the Trevelyans, with ancestors who owned slaves in the Caribbean and want to make peace.”

There have been recent efforts by the Caribbean Community (Caricom), an intergovernmental body for Caribbean nations, to secure payments and debt cancellation from former European colonial powers.

Ms Trevelyan said her future work would involve “advocating for Caricom’s restorative justice agenda.”

In February, Ms Trevelyan’s family was questioned about her ancestor’s role in the Irish famine after they apologized and made the donation to Grenada.

Trevelyan, whose aristocratic relatives owned more than 1,000 slaves on six sugar plantations on the Caribbean island in the 19th century, said his family was asking for forgiveness “for the role our ancestors played in slavery.”

Irish novelist Katherine Mezzacappa praised the announcement but asked if she had “any news” about her four-time great-grandfather, Sir Charles Trevelyan, the English official in charge of famine relief when outbreaks of potato blight killed half a million people. people in the 1840s. and 1850s.

The 1st Baronet is remembered in the Irish anthem, The Fields of Athenry, which tells the story of a fictional man who ‘stole Trevelyan’s corn’, a reference to food exported from Ireland while millions starved to death.

Ms Mezzacappa later told The Times: “I am very encouraged by Laura Trevelyan’s intent regarding her ancestral involvement in slavery, but I raised the subject of Charles Trevelyan because of the strange mismatch between the history being taught in the UK about the English and what they did elsewhere in a similar way”. needs attention. In the case of Ireland, Trevelyan is just one case; Walter Raleigh and, of course, Oliver Cromwell are others.

As you probably know, there was no reduction in the export of Irish corn to England in the famine years, even referred to as “Trevelyan’s corn” in The Fields of Athenry, but perhaps what is so surprising about inaction Trevelyan’s was his avowed belief that Irish sharecroppers had brought the misfortune of famine on themselves.

At the time, many within the British intelligentsia believed that the Irish were partly responsible for their own suffering due to perceived flaws in national character, based on long-established stereotypes, and their high birth rates.

Inadequate support from London is blamed for increasing the death toll from the famine, which also caused an estimated two million Irish to emigrate.

Sir Charles is known for saying that “God’s judgment sent calamity to teach the Irish a lesson.”

Ms Trevelyan announced that seven family members would travel to Grenada in February to make a public apology.

She told the BBC that her ancestors had received around £34,000 in 1834, the year after slavery was abolished in the UK, as compensation for the loss of “property”.

This equates to around £3 million today.

Ms Trevelyan acknowledged that giving £100,000 almost 200 years later might seem “inappropriate” but said: “I hope we are setting an example.”

She visited Granada for a documentary last year and said: ‘I felt ashamed and also felt it was my duty.

‘You can’t repair the past but you can recognize the pain.’

Historian David Olusoga told The Observer: “While governments stubbornly refuse to commit to the growing calls for reparations… there are families, businesses, universities, charities and other organizations that acknowledge their historical links to slavery and empire”.

But Alan Smithers of Buckingham University said: “These are days gone by and it’s not a route I think we should go down.”

He said that the reparations offered would be a “drop in the ocean” and risked “fomenting further demands in other countries of the world that are engaged in the slave trade.”