‘The Guardian’ apologizes for founders’ link to the slave trade

The Scott Trust, the foundation that owns the British newspaper The Guardian — a progressive media organization dedicated to defending the rule of law, public liberties and left-wing causes — on Tuesday apologized for its founders’ ties to the slave trade. The act of contrition comes in response to an extensive report commissioned by the same newspaper a couple of years ago, on the occasion of the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Under the name Scott Trust Legacies of Enslavement, scholars and researchers from the Universities of Nottingham and Hull followed the painstaking trail of commercial documents and historical evidence to determine the weight of slavery in the creation of a newspaper that emerged as a noble cause.

In 1819, more than 60,000 people gathered at St. Peter’s Field, in the center of the city of Manchester. They demanded the expansion of parliamentary representation in England as a way to achieve universal male suffrage. The cavalry charged against the protesters, and 15 of them died. John Edward Taylor, a journalist and cotton merchant — Manchester was a global textile powerhouse — witnessed the so-called Peterloo Massacre, and decided to found, two years later, The Manchester Guardian (the newspaper’s original name until the 1959 change). The original project aspired to liberal reform and a non-radical defense of the working classes.

The report released this week reveals that both Taylor and at least nine of the 11 founding partners who put money into the newspaper’s creation had ties to the slave trade. Most of them, including Taylor, received their cotton from plantations on the coast and on the offshore islands of South Carolina and Georgia in pre-Civil War America. Shuttleworth, Taylor & Co, the company owned by the newspaper’s founder, received shipments of cotton from the Sea Islands off the Georgian coast, and academic researchers recovered accounting records with the names and initials of plantation owners and slaveholders.

“The Scott Trust is deeply sorry for the role John Edward Taylor and his backers played in the cotton trade. We recognise that apologising and sharing these facts transparently is only the first step in addressing the Guardian’s historical links to slavery,” said Ole Jacob Sunde, chair of the Scott Trust.

“These facts, laid out plainly in the Legacies of Enslavement report, published by the Scott Trust today, are horrifying. ‘Different times’ is no excuse for chattel slavery, a crime against humanity,” wrote Katharine Viner, the editor-in-chief of The Guardian. “Why was this issue not considered until now, even under the editorship of CP Scott, who turned the Guardian to the anticolonial left and swept away so much that was unappealing about the 19th-century newspaper?”

One of the founders who contributed money to Taylor’s project, George Philips, owned slaves outright, as the co-owner of a sugar plantation in Hanover, Jamaica. In 1835, he even tried, unsuccessfully, to get the British government to compensate him for the loss of his human “property” after Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act two years earlier. At the time, the newspaper’s editorials defended those economic reparations for the slave owners. “We are convinced, that no plan for the abolition of slavery could have been worthy … which was not based on the great principles of justice to the planter as well as to the slave,” reads an editorial from 1833.

Restorative justice program

The Scott Trust has pledged £10 million ($12.3 million) over 10 years to fund restorative justice programs for descendant communities linked to the newspaper’s 19th-century founders. The exhaustive research work has made it possible to recover the names of Toby, Billy, January, Steven, Cuffy, Bob, Steven, Titus... up to 60 slaves from the Spanish Wells plantation on the islands off the coast of Georgia. The money will support aid projects in the Gullah Geechee region (the area where this ethnic group from West Africa was concentrated) and in Jamaica. An independent commission and an advisory panel will guide selection and monitoring of these programs.

Other measures approved by the foundation include awareness raising work in Manchester and other parts of the United Kingdom about the realities of the slave trade; increasing ethnic diversity in the media; funding for new academic research and a more ambitious approach by The Guardian itself when it comes to covering and reporting on issues related to racism or ethnic minorities.

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