Should all memorials with any links to slavery be removed? A moral reflection.

Robert Milligan's statue in London removed, John Sibley/Reuters

Following the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol on 7 June, the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, announced a commission to review London’s statues, street names and other memorials. Memorials commemorate individuals which we consider exemplary, those whose behaviour and actions we should seek to emulate. Therefore, with the knowledge of the horrifying conditions and suffering slaves endured offered by decades of academic scholarship, we recognise that an individual involved so heavily with the slave trade, and thus the enablement of human suffering, as Edward Colston should not be memorialised. Khan’s commendable but sweeping initiative, however, risks to establish even the slightest connection of an individual to a morally dubious cause as reason enough to remove their memorial. We should avoid this, as it puts the moral bar very high for ourselves.

 

There is a kernel of truth in what Boris Johnson tweeted following Colston’s toppling, noting the “different understandings of right and wrong” of previous generations. For Colston and many of his contemporary merchants, the slave trade and slavery was sound economic and scientific policy. Sound economic policy because, as highlighted by historian Timothy Lockley, African chiefs and princes often cooperated with European slave traders, and because African slaves were easier to watch and control than Native American slaves and therefore less losses would be incurred. Sound scientific policy because eighteenth-century scientists tended to emphasise the racial superiority of white Europeans. Works such as the colonial administrator Edward Long’s History of Jamaica (published 1774), which disturbingly claimed that black people are “the vilest of the human kind, to which they have little more pretension of resemblance than what arises from their exterior form,” had a wide readership and concurred with scientific consensus. This scientific consensus about the inferiority of black people was then used to justify their exceptional suitability for manual labour. 

 

Because slave trade and slavery were considered sound policy in the seventeenth, eighteenth and even nineteenth centuries, many memorials in nations which engaged in these activities commemorate individuals who partook in it one way or another. Colston’s tight engagement in the slave trade was exceptional, but any British gentleman of means could have been expected to own slaves in Britain or in the West Indies, or own colonial land cultivated by slaves, as pointed out by professor of civil law John Cairns. In 2013 the BBC reported on research which confirmed that “about 3000 British slave-owners received a total of £20m in compensation” after the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act. Should we remove all these memorials, regardless of the good the commemorated individuals may have done for national or local communities, for which their memorials were created?

 

In picking a moral point on a kind of moral spectrum at which it becomes necessary to remove a memorial, we must consider our own moral record. We are not innocent of inadvertently or even knowingly supporting causes which seem to us economically and scientifically sound, but whose moral status can be questioned. Consider the surge of customers who waited several hours to enter high street fashion stores on the day non-essential shops reopened in England. People reported to have missed shopping, but in returning to their cherished activity, and thus contributing to the economic recovery of these lockdown-stricken companies, they also abide by their continued failure to provide living wages for those who manufacture their clothes, despite corporate commitments to do so. For a high street fashion company, outsourcing both manufacture and its living wage commitments makes economic sense. For the company’s consumer (which, let's face it, includes me and you), purchasing affordable clothes makes economic sense. But the financial harm done by both company decision-makers and consumers who purchase their clothes to distant factory workers is undeniable.

 

Or consider current abortion policy. According to section one of the UK Abortion Act, a termination of pregnancy is legal if the unborn child is no older than 24 weeks, or if the pregnancy poses a great risk of injury to the physical or mental health or even life of the mother or any existing children of her family, or if the unborn child is highly likely to develop a serious handicap. Yet whether an unborn child is fully human before its twenty-fourth week, whether the rights to health and life of the mother and existing children should be prioritised over that of the unborn child, or whether a likely handicap justifies abortion are all still matters of scientific, philosophical and theological debate. The weight of scientific and other scholarly consensus might be on the pro-abortion side at the moment, but this can change, the same way as any scholarly debate can change. Recent years have seen a review of pro-abortion laws across the US – the 2019 annual report of the US sexual and reproductive healthcare provider Planned Parenthood states that “legislatures in 12 states passed 25 abortion bans in 2019 alone.” Planned Parenthood also opted out of a $286 million federal grant program after the US Department of Health and Human Services made it a condition for grantees to not refer patients for abortion, except in very limited circumstances. Legal challenges to abortion could potentially be followed by a shift of scientific and other scholarly consensus – if UK Marches for Life are an indicator, their size has been doubling every year since 2013. If this shift in scientific and scholarly consensus happens (emphasis on if), how would future us answer for the global 56 million abortions per year?

 

The point is this – as we decide at what moral point in relation to historical slave trade and slavery it is necessary to remove a memorial (and it will be in some), we must not forget that the slave trade and slavery were thought to be economically and scientifically sound policies at the time many commemorated individuals lived. If this is ignored, and all statues with even a slight connection to slave trade and slavery are removed, we are setting the moral bar high for ourselves. Future generations may point out the damaging hypocrisy of high street fashion stores and their consumers, as well as a predominantly liberal attitude to abortion which might (emphasis on might) in the future be predominantly construed as the taking of innocent life. Who of the great and the good of our generation can be commemorated then?