UK newspaper tied to slavery wants to make amends in Lowcountry communities

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) - Sorry is not enough: That’s why representatives of a newspaper in England are visiting the Lowcountry and places around the globe where the paper played a role in the enslavement of Africans, trying to turns words into actions.

In 2023, The Guardian newspaper, based in Manchester, England, admitted that its founder played a role in the transatlantic slave trade. It released this statement:

We will publish further reports in partnership with the University of Hull based on research findings about The Guardian founder and his funders, and their connections to the cotton industry and slavery economy; and on tracing the enslaved people whose knowledge and labour produced the wealth that enabled the founding of The Guardian.

An advisory committee affiliated with the paper is now working with historians in locations where slavery was institutionalized.

“Including South Carolina, Georgia, Jamaica, West Africa and then the works that they did in England. They made an apology to the communities and to the areas in which their founders were complicit in the African Slave Trade,” retired National Park Service Ranger Michael Allen said.

The group chose Allen, of Mount Pleasant, to be part of the Scott Trust Legacies of Enslavement Program.

Members from England spent time recently visiting historical sites in the Charleston area to learn how slavery impacted the lives of Black people on sea islands and other communities. Allen said formally apologizing is just the first step.

“Secondly, they say that they wanted to find a way to be creatively involved in these communities today because of what happened with their founders,” he says.

Allen says the organization wants to provide what it calls “restorative justice,” in a way that they can provide “support, funding, and whatever else ways can be created to potentially atone for what happened through their founders.”

The 10-year program is designed to have a positive future impact in African American/Gullah Geechee communities that grew out of a dark past.

Allen will be helping to organize meetings with local groups to solicit ideas of how the Scott Trust advisory panel can help organizations and communities here in the Lowcountry, and other locations impacted by the slave trade.

The full apology reads:

As the owners of the Guardian, the Scott Trust apologises to the affected communities identified in the research and surviving descendants of the enslaved for the part the Guardian and its founders had in this crime against humanity, perpetrated against their ancestors.

We are deeply sorry for the role Taylor and his backers played in the cotton trade, which benefited from the forced labour of enslaved people in the Americas; for Philips’ direct enslavement of people in Jamaica; and for the role the paper’s journalism played in supporting the economy of enslavement.

These connections are as relevant to the Guardian’s origin story as the 1819 Peterloo massacre, and they pose a fundamental question for us: what does it mean to be a progressive organisation that was born out of the profits of human bondage?

The ideology behind slavery was so embedded in 18th- and 19th-century Britain that even individuals and organisations who considered themselves liberal could be complicit in the most despicable crimes; and so our goal in responding to these facts should be to strive to do all we can in the present day to atone for these historical injustices, and to support those who still live with the legacy of this brutal and dehumanising era.

The paper’s website, which details the formation of the Scott Trust, states cotton merchant John Edward Taylor founded The Manchester Guardian in the wake of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819.

“The first edition appeared on 5 May 1821. Taylor’s nephew, C.P. Scott, went on to become editor in 1872 and bought the paper in 1907,” the website states. “C.P. Scott’s son John Russell Scott was determined to protect this legacy when, after the deaths of his father and brother, he became the paper’s owner. He established the Scott Trust in 1936 to secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity.”

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