The Guardian - formerly the Manchester Guardian - explored its roots as athe beneficiary of slave labor. The factories of Manchester were depicted in Friedrich Engels The Condition of the Working Class in England, written by him in the City 1842-1844. Of the conditions there Willliam Blake asked "And was jersualem builded here, among these dark satanic mills"
But beyond the sickly and oppressed (mostly Irish) workers in those mills were the slaves of the plantations in South Carolina, Georgia,lorida, Jamaica, Barbados and other Caribbean isles. The Barbados is leading a push for global reparations.
The Guardian has recently faced up to the history of how the fortune behind the progressive newspaper was acquired. The Times reports on the the product of the Guardian-commissioned study of the legacy of enslavement. The stands in marked contrast to Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin's effort to minimize instruction in the state's history as the capital of the Confederate States of America,
Unfortunately we have a solid majority of the United States Supreme Court who think we should put all that behind us as they abolish affirmative action in the hopefully soon to be notorious Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and University of North Carolina.
- GWC
A Top U.K. Newspaper Explores Its Ties to Slavery, and Britain’s - The New York TimesReporting from Manchester, England
It is the kind of historical artifact that would be easy to miss: an old and fragile little book unearthed in the archives of the Derbyshire Record Office, in the East Midlands of England. The book, a commercial ledger from 1822, holds the names of enslavers who ran cotton plantations on islands along the coast of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.
And on one of the browning pages, in elegant, handwritten script, someone has inked the name of the company buying that cotton: Shuttleworth, Taylor & Co.
Cassandra Gooptar, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Hull, knew that firm and had been hunting for any trace of it for five months. The Taylor in question was none other than John Edward Taylor, founder of The Manchester Guardian, now known simply as The Guardian, the most prominent progressive newspaper in Britain for more than two centuries.
“In that moment, what I realized is that we can now connect the founder of The Guardian to the enslaved people of the Sea Islands,” Ms. Gooptar said in a recent call from Trinidad, where she grew up. “It proved that he was importing cotton, picked by slaves, for profits.”
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