Are reparations Quaker business? Fred Ashmore reports
‘The first step is to understand we are all brainwashed.’
The answer is really simple. It’s a ‘no-brainer’ according to our main speaker, Richard Reddie, the director of Justice and Inclusion for Churches Together in Britain and Ireland. His answer came at the end of a powerful exposition to some forty London Friends on the subject of reparations. Richard has written several books on this subject. He has also worked with Quakers in several ecumenical bodies, and told us he had noticed how willing we were to talk about the ‘good stuff’ of abolition support but much less eager to talk about the participation of some Quakers in the ocean of darkness that was the slave trade. He reminded us of the Quaker shipmasters who transported enslaved Africans from Jamaica to Philadelphia, and the enslaver status of William Penn. Two days before he spoke to us we heard a profound apology from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation for profiting from slave labour.
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