Jamaica Demands Reparations for Britain's 'Haunting' Legacy of Slavery

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7. When slavery was abolished in the British West Indies in 1833 many of the planters took

the considerable sums paid by the British government to compensate them for the loss of slave labor and returned to the British Isles. There they built stately family homes and served as military and govt. officials like actor Benedict Cumberbatch's ancestors from Barbados. It was a black Bajan line of the Cumberbatch family that endowed the namesake building at Oxford University in the 1920s.

With the abolition of slavery on the islands, freed slaves received nothing after toiling to make their owners rich and comfortable doing the brutal work in sugar cane fields and processing lucrative products that created many wealthy sugar and rum barons on both sides of the Atlantic.

The De Wolf, or Wolf family of Rhode Island who held plantations in Cuba and elsewhere endowed Brown University like other affluent families who financially assisted and established early colonial colleges in America. Historian Craig Steven Wilder's 2013 book, "Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of America's Universities" focuses on this subject in depth.

In more than 250 years of institutional slavery in the United States, African American and Native American people erected the first, early 'Wall Street' in lower Manhattan in the 1600s, labored on buildings for the new Capital city like the White House, and played a major role in building the country.
America's economy and vast prosperity were fueled by the uncompensated labor of millions of slaves who were vital to the creation of wealth for leading colonial and American families, citizens and communities in New England, the Mid Atlantic and the South.

Postscript~ British actor Cumberbatch has spoken some to the press about his family's history and has taken roles of sympathetic characters in films. In "Amazing Grace" (2006) he played British Prime Minister Wm. Pitt the Younger, close ally of activist MP Wm. Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffold) who fought for decades to eradicate the slave trade and slavery in Great Britain. Ben also had a small part as a devout, more benign planter in the recent film "Twelve Years A Slave".