BBC reporter pledges over $100K in reparations after discovering her family owned slaves

BBC reporter Laura Trevelyan, whose family owned more than 1,000 slaves during the 19th century in Grenada, says her family will pay $120,000 in reparations, the New York Post reports.

BBC reporter Laura Trevelyan and her family announced the establishment of a community fund for economic development on the island nation of Grenada. “The Trevelyan family is apologizing to the people of Grenada for the role our ancestors played in enslavement on the island, and engaging in reparations,” Trevelyan tweeted Saturday.

In a letter of apology, forty-two members of the Trevelyan family said that slavery "was and is unacceptable and repugnant. Its damaging effects continue to the present day. We repudiate our ancestors’ involvement in it."

“What I read shocked me as it listed the ownership of 1,004 slaves over six estates shared by six of my ancestors,” said family member John Dower, who described discovering his lineage in the University College London slavery database. “I had no idea. It became apparent that no one living in the family knew about it. It had been expunged from the family history.”

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“If anyone had ‘white privilege,’ it was surely me, a descendant of Caribbean slave owners,” Trevelyan added.

“My own social and professional standing nearly 200 years after the abolition of slavery had to be related to my slave-owning ancestors, who used the profits from sugar sales to accumulate wealth and climb up the social ladder," she said.

Confronting my family’s slave-owning past in Grenada - BBC News www.youtube.com