An advisory council recommends that the Church of England establish a £1 billion fund to redress its historical ties to slavery. That is ten times what the church had previously allocated.
A 100 million pound fund revealed last year was deemed inadequate in comparison to the church’s riches, according to an unbiased oversight panel that was established by the church
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“the moral sin and crime of African chattel enslavement.”
The financial arm of the church, the Church Commissioners, said that it had accepted the group’s proposals, which included setting aside £1 billion “and above” for a fund called the Fund for Healing, Repair, and Justice.
The church said that it would not be increasing its £100-million pledge right now. However, instead of spending the first money over nine years as planned, it will do it over five, and by the end of the year, it wants to begin disbursing it, according to Church Commissioners Chief Executive Gareth Mostyn.
He mentioned other organizations or people who wanted to confront their own connections to slavery might contribute to the fund and “join us on this journey.”
The fund was started as a part of the Anglican church’s attempts to address its historical involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. In 2019, the Church Commissioners, the body in charge of managing the church’s £10 billion wealth fund, employed forensic accountants to search the church’s records for any indications of possible connections to the slave trade.
They discovered that Queen Anne’s Bounty, a fund created in 1704 to aid in the upkeep of destitute clergy, was the source of the church’s enormous holdings. It made significant investments in the South Sea Company, which had a monopoly on bringing slaves from Africa to ports under Spanish rule in the Americas. 34,000 passengers were carried by the firm on at least 96 trips between 1714 and 1739.
Several wealthy slave traders also contributed to Queen Anne’s Bounty, notably Edward Colston, a British slave dealer whose statue in his hometown of Bristol was overturned by anti-racism demonstrators in 2020.
Although the British government banned the slave trade in 1807, it did not pass laws emancipating slaves within its borders until 1833.
The head of the Church of England, Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has pledged to rectify the “shameful past.” The ideas, according to him, mark “the beginning of a multi-generational response to the appalling evil of trans-Atlantic chattel enslavement.”
The new fund’s investments will go toward underprivileged Black communities with the goal of “backing their most brilliant social entrepreneurs, educators, healthcare givers, asset managers, and historians,” The report of the oversight committee said.
Some activists have demanded that organizations that profited from slavery compensate the descendants of those who were slaves, and this promise falls short of their demands.
The oversight committee also demanded an apology from the church, “for denying that black Africans are made in the image of God and for seeking to destroy diverse African traditional religious belief systems.”
The monitoring group’s leader, Rosemarie Mallett, the bishop of Croydon, stated that no amount of money can “fully atone for or fully redress the centuries-long impact of African chattel enslavement, the effects of which are still felt around the world today” in bleak opportunities for many Black individuals.
However, she said that the church was “stepping forth quite boldly, quite audaciously, and saying: ‘We can do this, others should join in.”
