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Tag: slavery

  • Ron DeSantis’s “Slavery Was a Good Thing” Curriculum Weirdly Unpopular Among GOP Hopefuls

    Ron DeSantis’s “Slavery Was a Good Thing” Curriculum Weirdly Unpopular Among GOP Hopefuls

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    A lot of crazy s–t has come out of Florida over the last number of years—see: every headline that starts with “Florida Man…”—but almost none of it compares to what the Sunshine State came up with earlier this month, when the Board of Education approved a new set of rules requiring teachers to tell students that there were upsides to being enslaved. Yes, really: The state literally requires instruction on “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

    Obviously, this is completely nuts, as is the fact that Florida governor and 2024 presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has repeatedly defended the new curriculum standards, saying its authors “did a good job” and that it would be totally reasonable to “show that some of the folks…eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.” To be clear, “the folks” the governor is talking about here are enslaved people, and he’s suggesting that there were positive trade-offs to being human property.

    Not surprisingly, a number of DeSantis’s rivals for the GOP nomination have seized on Florida’s batshit new rules as well as DeSantis’s decision to back them. On Sunday, appearing on NBC News’ Meet the Press, former GOP congressman Will Hurd said that “anybody that is implying that there was an upside to slavery is insane.” (He also noted the obvious, which is that “slavery is not a jobs program.”) Hurd added: “It’d be hard to make the case, if Ron DeSantis was the Republican nominee, that folks in Black and brown communities should support him.”

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    Also on Sunday, former UN ambassador and 2024 hopeful Nikki Haley told CBS News’ Face the Nation: “It’s the 21st century. And I think we can all agree that…there were no positives that came out of slavery,” adding that DeSantis should say as much. On CNN’s State of the Union, fellow 2024 candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said that “obviously, we should be teaching kids about the awful legacy of slavery.”

    Days earlier, Representative Tim Scott—the sole Black Republican in the Senate—told reporters at a campaign stop: “As a country founded upon freedom, the greatest deprivation of freedom was slavery. There is no silver lining…in slavery…What slavery was really about [was] separating families, about mutilating humans, and even raping their wives. It was just devastating.”

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  • Citigroup admits its predecessors likely benefited from slavery

    Citigroup admits its predecessors likely benefited from slavery

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    Citigroup has grown into the nation’s third-largest financial institution in part because its predecessors in the 1800s indirectly profited from slavery, the company acknowledged in a blog post this week.

    The admission came as the Wall Street firm, JPMorgan Chase and other big banks have re-examined their roots in years, looking to unearth what roles they may have played in creating today’s racial inequities. 

    Citi first explored its historic ties to slavery 20 years ago but “did not find records providing evidence of any direct involvement,” Edward Skyler, Citigroup’s head of public affairs, wrote in the post. But a second initiative conducted last year found that the bank’s predecessors “likely profited from financial transactions and relationships with individuals and entities …  involved in or connected to the U.S. slave trade,” according to Citi’s research summary, which Skyler linked to in his post.  

    One such predecessor was Moses Taylor, who served as director and president of City Bank of New York — Citi’s name at the time — for much of the mid 1800s. Taylor amassed a large fortune from Cuba’s sugar plantations, which used slave labor, according to Citi’s research.  


    Tim Scott slams Florida Black history curriculum: “There is no silver lining in slavery”

    01:14

    Many of the nation’s biggest banks, including Citi, are conglomerations of financial institutions that have merged or bought each other over the years. Citi traces its founding back to 1812 as City Bank of New York. What today is known as Citigroup grew from more than 400 predecessor companies, of which 21 were created before 1866. Slavery as a legal institution in the continental U.S. formally ended on June 14, 1866. 

    Citi conducted its most recent review of the company’s legacy using archives from Cornell University, a historic society in Mobile, Alabama, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress and the Alabama Supreme Court. 

    The review also found that Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company, which later became Citibank (a part of Citigroup), accepted a trust application in the amount of $600,000 for property owned by Henry Hitchcock, Alabama’s first attorney general, a man who enslaved 24 unknown people. 

    The property, valued at $1.9 million at the time, raised concern among Citi’s researchers team that the assets held under trust by Farmer’s Loan “may have included persons enslaved by Hitchcock.”  While they ultimately concluded that the trust transaction did not result in Citi’s predecessor “owning” any people enslaved on the property, it did acknowledge the bank’s financial benefit from its dealings with Hitchcock.

    “Although the focus of our historic records review was Citi’s own activity, we acknowledge that people who played important roles in Citi’s history had ties to the slave trade,” Skyler wrote. “Additionally, other founding or early directors of City Bank of New York likely owned enslaved persons. None of this changes the past but it can help make for a more equitable future.”

    Citi also found that the company held bank accounts for individuals and companies that operated in slaveholding states. 

    The bank is hardly alone in its connection to U.S. slavery. JPMorgan in 2005 acknowledged that two of its predecessor banks had links to the slave trade, with two banks in Louisiana receiving thousands of slaves that were used as collateral.

    Wachovia, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank that failed in the 2008 financial crisis and was subsequently bought by Wells Fargo, also admitted in 2005 that its history has ties to slavery. Wachovia found that its predecessors — the Bank of Charleston and Georgia Railroad and Banking Company — both owned slaves.

    —The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

    Khristopher J. Brooks

    Khristopher J. Brooks is a reporter for CBS MoneyWatch covering business, consumer and financial stories that range from economic inequality and housing issues to bankruptcies and the business of sports.

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  • Tim Scott slams Florida’s Black history curriculum: “There is no silver lining” in slavery

    Tim Scott slams Florida’s Black history curriculum: “There is no silver lining” in slavery

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    Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, a Republican presidential candidate, on Thursday rebuked his opponent, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and his state over its controversial new standards on how Black history is taught in middle school, which includes instruction on how “slaves developed skills” that “could be applied for their personal benefit.”

    “There is no silver lining” in slavery, Scott responded when asked by a reporter following a town hall in suburban Des Moines about that element of Florida’s new curriculum. 

    “What slavery was really about [was] separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives,” said Scott, who is the Senate’s only Black Republican, and the only Black presidential candidate. “It was just devastating. So, I would hope that every person in our country — and certainly running for president — would appreciate that.” 

    He also suggested that Florida’s Black history standard represents a question that will and should come up again on the campaign trail. 

    “Listen, people have bad days. Sometimes they regret what they say,” Scott said. “And we should ask them again to clarify their positions.” 

    DeSantis’ initial response to the uproar over the new standard was to back away from it. 

    “I didn’t do it. And I wasn’t involved in it,” he told reporters last Friday. He added, “I think that they’re probably going to show — some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.”

    Another GOP presidential opponent, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, told “Face the Nation” moderator Margaret Brennan Sunday that words like “I didn’t do it” “are not the words of leadership.” 

    “From listening and watching [DeSantis’] comments, he’s obviously uncomfortable,” Christie said. 

    GOP Rep. Byron Donalds, the sole Black member of Florida’s congressional delegation, has faced a strong backlash from DeSantis’ campaign and Florida officials over his gentle criticism of the standard, which was tucked into a comment that overall praised the state Education Department’s curriculum. 

    “The new African-American standards in FL are good, robust, & accurate. That being said, the attempt to feature the personal benefits of slavery is wrong & needs to be adjusted. That obviously wasn’t the goal & I have faith that FLDOE will correct this,” he posted on social media Wednesday morning. 

    But DeSantis allies were soon trying to tie him to Vice President Kamala Harris, who recently criticized the standards during a speech in Jacksonville, Florida.

    “How is it that anyone could suggest that amidst these atrocities [of slavery], there was any ‘benefit’ to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?” Harris said last Sunday.

    Manny Diaz Jr., Florida’s education commissioner, questioned Donalds’ conservatism, lumping him in with Democrats who have lambasted the standards. 

    “We will not back down from teaching our nation’s true history at the behest of a woke @WhiteHouse, nor at the behest of a supposedly conservative congressman,” Diaz tweeted. 

    And DeSantis press secretary Jeremy Redfern tweeted, “Florida isn’t going to hide the truth for political convenience. Maybe the congressman shouldn’t swing for the liberal media fences like @VP.”

    In Iowa on Thursday, DeSantis spoke with reporters and defended the creation of the new standards, arguing that Harris was trying to “demagogue” the issue. He then compared the line in the new standards to language in the framework of an AP African American Studies course, which Florida initially rejected, about how enslaved people “learned specialized trades and worked as painters, carpenters, tailors, musicians and healers in the North and South.” 

    “Once free, African Americans used these skills to provide for themselves and others,” the AP African American Studies course framework says. 

    On Wednesday night, Donalds, a former DeSantis ally who has endorsed former President Donald Trump, tweeted, “Anyone who can’t accurately interpret what I said is disingenuous and is desperately attempting to score political points.”

    In an interview with CBS News Thursday, DeSantis denied he’s picking a fight with Donalds. 

    “You had nobody raising a ruckus about this until it became convenient to try to do it, so I would just say, you know, I’d ask all my colleagues in Florida, stand up for your state, don’t side with Kamala Harris,” he said. 

    — Aaron Navarro, Musadiq Bidar and Laura Garrison contributed to this report.

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  • Tim Scott Rebukes Ron DeSantis Over Florida’s Slavery Curriculum

    Tim Scott Rebukes Ron DeSantis Over Florida’s Slavery Curriculum

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    Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) called out fellow 2024 GOP presidential contender Ron DeSantis over his state’s controversial slavery curriculum, which says that students should be taught that enslaved people developed skills for personal benefit.

    “There is no silver lining in slavery. The truth is anything you could learn, any benefits that people suggest be had from slavery, you would have had as a free person,” Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, told reporters on Thursday at a campaign stop in Iowa.

    The curriculum has drawn sharp criticism from civil rights groups and prominent Black politicians from both parties, including Vice President Kamala Harris; former Rep. Will Hurd, who is also running in the 2024 GOP race; and conservative Florida Rep. Byron Donalds.

    DeSantis claimed the standards are being misconstrued in a testy exchange with a reporter earlier on Thursday, saying it is “not what the curriculum says,” without elaborating further.

    The Florida governor also took a swing at Donalds, a rising star in the GOP who has endorsed former President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, accusing him of siding with Harris and other Democrats. “Are you going to side with Kamala Harris and liberal media outlets, or are you going to side with the state of Florida?” DeSantis said.

    Scott, who often speaks about his family’s journey from Jim Crow-era cotton fields in South Carolina to the U.S. Congress, suggested on Thursday that DeSantis clarify his position.

    “Slavery was really about separating families, about mutilating humans, and even raping their wives. It was just devastating, so I would hope that every person in our country, and certainly running for president, would appreciate that,” Scott said.

    He added: “People have bad days. Sometimes they regret what they say, and we should ask them again to clarify their positions.”

    Harris also tore into the Florida educational standards last week during a last-minute trip to DeSantis’ backyard of Jacksonville.

    “They want to replace history with lies,” Harris said. “They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, and we will not have it.”

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  • Florida blasted for its Black history curriculum:

    Florida blasted for its Black history curriculum:

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    Florida blasted for its Black history curriculum: “They want to replace history with lies” – CBS News


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    The Florida State Board of Education released a controversial new school curriculum this week that was immediately criticized for its depiction of African American history. One section of the curriculum reads that its “instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” In a fiery speech Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris said of the curriculum: “They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us.” Manuel Bojorquez reports.

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  • Divisions over the Ukraine war cause a rift at the EU-LatAm summit that was supposed to be a love-in

    Divisions over the Ukraine war cause a rift at the EU-LatAm summit that was supposed to be a love-in

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    BRUSSELS — High anxiety set in on the closing day of a summit between European Union and Latin American leaders that was supposed to be a love-in but turned into a diplomatic fracas over the war in Ukraine.

    Ambassadors worked through much of the night and into Tuesday morning to find even the blandest text to condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, with talks hung up over the reservations of some Central and South American nations like Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

    “It would be a shame that we are not able to to say that there is Russian aggression in Ukraine. It’s a fact. And I’m not here to rewrite history,” an exasperated Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel said.

    Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar pushed it even further. “Sometimes it’s better to have no conclusions at all than to have language that doesn’t mean anything,” he said.

    The long-anticipated summit, eight years after the previous one, descended into a standoff over who would blink first over an issue that a vast majority of the 60 nations attending had already agreed on in several votes at the United Nations and other international institutions.

    While the 27-nation EU wanted the summit to center on new economic initiatives and closer cooperation to stave off surging Chinese influence in the region, several leaders of the 33-nation Community of Latin American and Caribbean States brought century-old recriminations over colonialism and slavery to the table.

    “Most of Europe was, and still is, overwhelmingly the lopsided beneficiary in a relationship in which our Latin America, and our Caribbean, have been and are unequally yoked,” said St. Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves, who holds the CELAC presidency.

    The diplomatic defense of Ukraine and the condemnation of Moscow is everyday staple for EU nations, but many Latin and Central American governments have taken a more neutral view to a conflict in Europe that for them in only one of many blighting the world.

    While the EU pushes for strong words on the war, Gonsalves said that “this summit ought not to become another unhelpful battleground for discourses on this matter, which has been and continues to be addressed in other, more relevant fora.”

    The result was that long-stalled trade agreements — like a huge EU-Mercosur deal — will likely be no closer to resolution when the leaders wrap up their summit Tuesday afternoon.

    If something were on show, it was Central and South America’s increased confidence, boosted by a huge injection of funds from China and the knowledge that their critical raw materials will become ever more vital as the EU seeks to end an excessive reliance on Beijing’s rare mineral resources.

    Their last such encounter was in 2015, and since then the COVID-19 pandemic and Brazil’s three-year departure from the 33-nation CELAC group had made the Atlantic Ocean separating the two sides seem wider.

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  • EU and Latin American leaders hold a summit hoping to rekindle relationship with long-lost friends

    EU and Latin American leaders hold a summit hoping to rekindle relationship with long-lost friends

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    BRUSSELS — Leaders from the European Union and Latin America are gathering for a major summit of long-lost relatives starting on Monday. Whether it will be a joyful meeting of long-lost friends remains to be seen.

    Their last such encounter was eight years ago. Since then, the COVID-19 pandemic and Brazil’s three-year departure from the 33-nation Community of Latin American and Caribbean States — or CELAC — had made the Atlantic Ocean separating the two sides seem wider.

    And division ranging from Russia’s war in Ukraine to trade, deforestation and slavery reparations has given extra spice to a two-day summit that will now already be considered a success if all agree to meet more frequently from now on.

    The 27-nation EU certainly takes it share of the blame for the estrangement.

    “For too many years, Europe has been turning its back on what is, without a doubt, by far the most Euro-compatible region on the planet,” said Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares of Spain, which holds the rotating EU presidency.

    Several EU nations have ties to the Americas going back centuries and was for so long based on exploitative colonialism and slavery. And even since the nations wrested independence from European powers, sometimes as long as 200 years ago, trade was seen for too long as a one-way street where Europeans stood to benefit first and foremost.

    In the 21st century though, China has steadily been pushing its influence and trade outreach deep into Latin America, and the EU realizes it has a geo-strategic battle on its hands.

    “A lot of European companies have lost ground,” said Parsifal D’Sola, executive director of the Center of Chinese-Latin American Investigations.

    “There is an overall interest in counterbalancing the economic influence that China has throughout the world, but in this particular case in Latin America,” D’Sola said.

    The EU has called China a “ systemic rival ” for four years now, and has seen Beijing rapidly encroach on Europe’s age-old interests in Africa, and Central and South America. Up to a point that D’Sola now warns that China’s flexibility and heavy investment in a variety of sectors will make it difficult to truly pull influence away from Beijing in the way that EU nations may desire.

    Still, there is no underestimating Europe’s continued clout in Latin America, especially when it comes to the economy. The latest figures show that annual trade between the two blocs has increased by 39% over the past decade to 369 billion euros ($414 billion). EU investment in the region stood at 693 billion euros ($777 billion), a 45% increase over the past decade. The EU already has trade deals with 27 of the 33 CELAC nations.

    It is also why the elephant in the room will be the huge EU-Mercosur trade agreement between the EU bloc and Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, which now still lays foundering for five years just short of full ratification.

    Several EU nations have powerful farm lobbies that seek to keep competition from beef producing nations like Brazil and Argentina at bay. And after then Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro allowed Amazon deforestation to surge to a 15-year high, EU nations have been insisting on tougher environmental standards.

    When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who succeeded Bolsonaro this year, and took the presidency of Mercosur in early July, he called the threat of EU sanctions “unacceptable.” Before the summit, EU officials were at pains to insist that sanctions on countries that fail to comply with the 2015 international climate Paris Agreement weren’t on the table this week and lauded Lula’s efforts to turn back rampant deforestation.

    Overall though, “there’s a disposition on both sides to finally get the deal off the ground,” said Caio Marcondes, a political scientist from the University of Sao Paulo.

    Russia and the war in Ukraine is now also a point of division instead of a natural unifier. CELAC has member nations like Cuba and Venezuela, whose views on Russia constrast with just about every EU nation. There was initially an expectation that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would address the summit. That idea has now been shelved.

    Such issues have seriously complicated drafting a joint summit statement, which was long expected to be a long and detailed text, but is now quickly turning into a “shorthand declaration,” a senior EU official involved in the drafting said. He spoke on condition of anonimity since talks were ongoing.

    He also didn’t expect “any particular breakthrough” on the Mercosur deal or other outstanding trade agreements, but added that the summit could create momentum “that all of these trade agreements are coming together this year.”

    ____

    Megan Janetsky in Mexico City, and Eléonore Hughes in Rio de Janeiro, contributed to this report.

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  • Dutch king apologizes for Netherlands’ historic role in slavery | CNN

    Dutch king apologizes for Netherlands’ historic role in slavery | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Dutch King Willem-Alexander on Saturday apologized for the Netherlands’ historic involvement in slavery and the effects that it still has today.

    The king was speaking at a ceremony marking the 160th anniversary of the legal abolition of slavery in the Netherlands, including its former colonies in the Caribbean.

    “On this day that we remember the Dutch history of slavery, I ask forgiveness for this crime against humanity,” he said. He said racism in Dutch society remains a problem and not everyone would support his apology.

    However “the times have changed and Keti Koti … the chains have truly been broken,” he said to cheers and applause of thousands of onlookers at the national slavery monument in Amsterdam’s Oosterpark.

    “Keti Koti” are Surinamese words that mean the ‘the chain is broken’ and it is the title given to July 1 as a day of remembrance of slavery and celebration of freedom.

    The apology comes amid a wider reconsideration of the Netherlands’ colonial past, including involvement in both the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in its former Asian colonies.

    Willem-Alexander apologized in Indonesia in 2020 for “excessive violence” during Dutch colonial rule.

    In December, Prime Minister Mark Rutte acknowledged the Dutch state bears a responsibility in the Atlantic slave trade and profited from it, and apologized.

    Rutte has said the government will not pay reparations, as an advisory panel recommended in 2021.

    A government-commissioned study published last month found that the House of Orange profited by around $600 million in modern terms from Dutch colonies in 1675-1770, much of it given as a gift from the Dutch East India Company’s spice trade profits.

    The Royal House in December commissioned an independent investigation into the Royal Family’s role in colonial history, with results expected in 2025.

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  • The Dutch king could offer an apology in a speech on the anniversary of slavery’s abolition in 1863

    The Dutch king could offer an apology in a speech on the anniversary of slavery’s abolition in 1863

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    AMSTERDAM — Dutch King Willem-Alexander will deliver a speech Saturday to commemorate the anniversary of the country abolishing slavery, amid speculation that he could offer an apology on behalf of the royal house.

    The king’s speech follows Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s apology late last year for the country’s role in the slave trade and slavery. It is part of a wider reckoning with colonial histories in the West that have been spurred in recent years by the Black Lives Matter movement.

    Slavery was abolished in Suriname and the Dutch colonies in the Caribbean on July 1, 1863, but most of the enslaved laborers were forced to continue working on plantations for a further 10 years. Saturday’s commemoration and speech mark the start of a year of events to mark the 150th anniversary of July 1, 1873.

    Research published last month showed that the king’s ancestors earned the modern-day equivalent of 545 million euros ($595 million) from slavery, including profits from shares that were effectively given to them as gifts.

    When Rutte apologized in December for the Netherlands’ historic role in slavery and the slave trade — an apology that also included the royal house — he stopped short of offering compensation to descendants of enslaved people.

    Instead, the government is establishing a 200 million-euro ($217 million) fund for initiatives that tackle the legacy of slavery in the Netherlands and its former colonies and to improve education about the issue.

    That isn’t enough for some in the Netherlands. Two groups, Black Manifesto and The Black Archives, organized a protest march before the king’s speech Saturday under the banner “No healing without reparations.”

    “A lot of people including myself, my group, The Black Archives, and the Black Manifesto say that (an) apology is not enough. An apology should be tied to a form of repair and reparatory justice or reparations,” said Black Archives director Mitchell Esajas.

    Marchers wore colorful traditional clothing in a Surinamese celebration of the abolition of slavery. Enslaved people were banned from wearing shoes and colorful clothes, organizers said.

    “Just as we remember our forefathers on this day, we also feel free, we can wear what we want, and we can show the rest of the world that we are free.” said 72-year-old Regina Benescia-van Windt.

    The Netherlands’ often brutal colonial history has come under renewed and critical scrutiny in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, in the U.S. city of Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

    A groundbreaking 2021 exhibition at the national museum of art and history took an unflinching look at slavery in Dutch colonies. In the same year, a report described the Dutch involvement in slavery as a crime against humanity and linked it to what the report described as ongoing institutional racism in the Netherlands.

    The Dutch first became involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the late 1500s and became a major trader in the mid-1600s. Eventually, the Dutch West India Company became the largest trans-Atlantic slave trader, according to Karwan Fatah-Black, an expert in Dutch colonial history and an assistant professor at Leiden University.

    Authorities in the Netherlands aren’t alone in saying sorry for historic abuses.

    In 2018, Denmark apologized to Ghana, which it colonized from the mid-17th century to the mid-19th century. King Philippe of Belgium has expressed “deepest regrets” for abuses in Congo. In 1992, Pope John Paul II apologized for the church’s role in slavery. Americans have had emotionally charged disputes over taking down statues of slaveholders in the South.

    In April, King Charles III for the first time signaled support for research into the U.K. monarchy’s ties to slavery after a document showed an ancestor with shares in a slave-trading company, a Buckingham Palace spokesperson said.

    Charles and his eldest son, Prince William, have expressed their sorrow over slavery, but haven’t acknowledged the crown’s connections to the trade.

    During a ceremony that marked Barbados becoming a republic two years ago, Charles referred to “the darkest days of our past and the appalling atrocity of slavery, which forever stains our history.” English settlers used African slaves to turn the island into a wealthy sugar colony.

    ___

    Mike Corder reported from Ede.

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  • The Dutch king could offer an apology in a speech on the anniversary of slavery’s abolition in 1863

    The Dutch king could offer an apology in a speech on the anniversary of slavery’s abolition in 1863

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    AMSTERDAM — Dutch King Willem-Alexander will deliver a speech Saturday to commemorate the anniversary of the country abolishing slavery, amid speculation that he could offer an apology on behalf of the royal house.

    The king’s speech follows Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s apology late last year for the country’s role in the slave trade and slavery. It is part of a wider reckoning with colonial histories in the West that have been spurred in recent years by the Black Lives Matter movement.

    Slavery was abolished in Suriname and the Dutch colonies in the Caribbean on July 1, 1863, but most of the enslaved laborers were forced to continue working on plantations for a further 10 years. Saturday’s commemoration and speech mark the start of a year of events to mark the 150th anniversary of July 1, 1873.

    Research published last month showed that the king’s ancestors earned the modern-day equivalent of 545 million euros ($595 million) from slavery, including profits from shares that were effectively given to them as gifts.

    When Rutte apologized in December for the Netherlands’ historic role in slavery and the slave trade — an apology that also included the royal house — he stopped short of offering compensation to descendants of enslaved people.

    Instead, the government is establishing a 200 million-euro ($217 million) fund for initiatives that tackle the legacy of slavery in the Netherlands and its former colonies and to improve education about the issue.

    That isn’t enough for some in the Netherlands. Two groups, Black Manifesto and The Black Archives, organized a protest march before the king’s speech Saturday under the banner “No healing without reparations.”

    “A lot of people including myself, my group, The Black Archives, and the Black Manifesto say that (an) apology is not enough. An apology should be tied to a form of repair and reparatory justice or reparations,” said Black Archives director Mitchell Esajas.

    Marchers wore colorful traditional clothing in a Surinamese celebration of the abolition of slavery. Enslaved people were banned from wearing shoes and colorful clothes, organizers said.

    “Just as we remember our forefathers on this day, we also feel free, we can wear what we want, and we can show the rest of the world that we are free.” said 72-year-old Regina Benescia-van Windt.

    The Netherlands’ often brutal colonial history has come under renewed and critical scrutiny in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, in the U.S. city of Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

    A groundbreaking 2021 exhibition at the national museum of art and history took an unflinching look at slavery in Dutch colonies. In the same year, a report described the Dutch involvement in slavery as a crime against humanity and linked it to what the report described as ongoing institutional racism in the Netherlands.

    The Dutch first became involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the late 1500s and became a major trader in the mid-1600s. Eventually, the Dutch West India Company became the largest trans-Atlantic slave trader, according to Karwan Fatah-Black, an expert in Dutch colonial history and an assistant professor at Leiden University.

    Authorities in the Netherlands aren’t alone in saying sorry for historic abuses.

    In 2018, Denmark apologized to Ghana, which it colonized from the mid-17th century to the mid-19th century. King Philippe of Belgium has expressed “deepest regrets” for abuses in Congo. In 1992, Pope John Paul II apologized for the church’s role in slavery. Americans have had emotionally charged disputes over taking down statues of slaveholders in the South.

    In April, King Charles III for the first time signaled support for research into the U.K. monarchy’s ties to slavery after a document showed an ancestor with shares in a slave-trading company, a Buckingham Palace spokesperson said.

    Charles and his eldest son, Prince William, have expressed their sorrow over slavery, but haven’t acknowledged the crown’s connections to the trade.

    During a ceremony that marked Barbados becoming a republic two years ago, Charles referred to “the darkest days of our past and the appalling atrocity of slavery, which forever stains our history.” English settlers used African slaves to turn the island into a wealthy sugar colony.

    ___

    Mike Corder reported from Ede.

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  • As the nation celebrates Juneteenth, it’s time to get rid of these three myths about slavery | CNN

    As the nation celebrates Juneteenth, it’s time to get rid of these three myths about slavery | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Temple “Tempie” Cummins stoically stares at the camera with her arms folded in her lap, sitting stiffly in a chair in her dusty, barren backyard with her weather-beaten wooden shack behind her. Her dark, creased face reflects years of poverty and worry.

    The faded black and white image of Cummins from 1937 was snapped by a historian who stopped by her home in Jasper, Texas, to ask her about her childhood during slavery. Cummins, who did not know her exact age, shared stories of uninterrupted woe until she recounted how she and her mother discovered that they had been freed.

    She said her mother, a cook for their former slave owner’s family, liked to hide in the chimney corner to eavesdrop on dinner conversations. One day in 1865, she overheard her owner say that slavery had ended, but he wasn’t going to let his slaves know until they harvested “another crop or two.”

    “When mother heard that she say she slip out the chimney corner and crack her heels together four times and shouts, ‘I’s free, I’s free,’ ” Cummins told the historian, who recorded her story for a New Deal writers’ project that collected the narratives of the formerly enslaved during the Great Depression. “Then she runs to the field, ‘gainst marster’s will and tol’ all the other slaves and they quit work.”

    That story is one of the first recorded memoires of an experience that would inspire the creation of Juneteenth, an annual holiday celebrating the end of slavery that the US will commemorate this Monday. It marks the moment in June of 1865 when Union troops arrived in Texas to inform enslaved African Americans that they were free by executive decree. Many people like Cummins in remote areas of Texas and elsewhere did not know that they were free as their White owners hid the news from them.

    Juneteenth has since become known as “America’s Second Independence Day.” Now a federal holiday, it will be celebrated by parades, proclamations, and ceremonies throughout the US. Though it commemorates a moment when enslaved African Americans were freed, the US is still held captive by several myths about slavery and people like Cummins.

    One of the biggest myths that historians and storytellers have successfully challenged in recent years is that enslaved African Americans were docile, passive victims who had to wait until White abolitionists and “The Great Emancipator” Abraham Lincoln freed them. Black soldiers, for example, played a pivotal role in winning the Civil War. This new understanding of slavery has led to a rhetorical shift: It’s no longer proper to refer to people like Cummins as simply “slaves.”

    “There’s been a shift in the historical community attempting to not define the period or the people by what was done to them in the sense that their identity becomes a noun, a slave, but rather that they are that they were in the process of being enslaved,” says Tobin Miller Shearer, a historian and director of African American Studies at the University of Montana.

    “There were slavers who did that to them,” he says, “but there’s more to their identity than what was being done to them.”

    Yet other myths about slavery persist, in part, because of the sheer enormity and brutality of slavery.

    “The enslavement of an estimated ten million Africans over a period of almost four centuries in the Atlantic slave trade was a tragedy of such scope that it is difficult to imagine, much less comprehend,” Albert J. Raboteau wrote in “Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution’ in the Antebellum South.”

    Here are three other myths about slavery that historians say persist:

    There is a popular conception that the formerly enslaved were freed after the Civil War ended. But many had to continually fight for their freedom because so many Whites still tried to keep them in captivity and were willing to use deceit and violence to do so.

    The author Clint Smith described this dynamic in his New York Times bestselling book, “How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with The History of Slavery Across America.” Smith said the Juneteenth jubilation didn’t last for many formerly enslaved people. Former Confederate soldiers still tried to round up Black “runaways” to return them to their owners though that term no longer had any legal merit. And White vigilantes tracked down and punished formerly enslaved people.

    Smith unearthed the narrative of a woman named Susan Merritt of Rusk Country, Texas, who recounted what happened when some people like Cummins in Texas tried to claim their freedom:

    “Lots of Negroes were killed after freedom…bushwhacked, shot down while they were trying to get away,” Merritt said. “You could see lots of Negroes hanging from trees in Sabine bottom right after freedom. They would catch them swimming across Sabine River and shoot them.”

    A sketch of

    And then there was the practice of taking away Black freedom through other means, like convict-leasing programs and a corrupt justice system throughout the South that the historian Douglas A. Blackmon documented in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Slavery By Another Name.”

    The lesson from history: Slavery didn’t end with the Emancipation Proclamation. Black people still had to literally fight for their freedom long afterward. Smith quotes the historian W. Caleb McDaniel who wrote:

    “Slavery did not end cleanly or on a single day. It ended through a violent, uneven process.”

    Mention slavery and it still evokes images of half-naked Africans stumbling onto the American shores, struggling to learn to read and write in a strange and alien land. The focus of many stories about the formerly enslaved is what was taken from them. But they gave plenty to America in ways that are still not appreciated.

    Captive Africans who came here didn’t need to be civilized. They came to the US as fully formed individuals, not blank canvases, with their own cultures and specialized knowledge, says Leslie Wilson, a historian at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

    The thumbprints of the culture that formerly enslaved people created are now stamped on virtually every facet of American culture, Wilson says. By the Civil War, Black people had already changed American concepts of architecture, burial, music, storytelling and medicine, Wilson says.

    “Much of Southern culture is nothing more than blackness,” Wilson says. “It is the blues and jazz of the 19th century and the rock and roll of the 20th. It is the chicken and grits, the way that people rock in church or the cadence of the pastor.”

    If that sounds like hyperbole, consider how much of Americans’ contemporary landscape is shaped by the legacy of the formerly enslaved:

    • The Statue of Liberty was originally created to commemorate freed enslaved people, not the arrival of immigrants.
    • An enslaved person called Onesimus changed the way Americans treated epidemics, pioneering a technique to prevent the spread of smallpox that he had learned from his native West Africa.
    • Country music owes much of its musical legacy to the influence of the formerly enslaved. The banjo, for example, is a descendant of an instrument that was brought to America by enslaved West Africans and many of the genre’s earliest hits were adapted from slave spirituals.
    • Bugs Bunny cartoons and other stories like Brer Rabbit featuring clever, talking animals were originally inspired by African folktales first told by enslaved people.
    Brer Rabbit chatting with little rabbit children in an illustration for the book,

    Black and White culture is so intertwined that the cultural critic, Albert Murray, declared in his book, “The Omni-Americans,” that “American culture is “incontestably mulatto.” White and Black people in the US “resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.”

    “The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people. It is a nation of multicolored people,” Murray wrote. “Any fool can see that the white people are not really white, and that black people are not black. They are all interrelated one way or another.”

    In the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, there is a special exhibit of an artifact that is so rare that there are only a handful now in existence. It is what historians call a “Slave Bible.” It is a copy of a Bible that was used by British missionaries to convert enslaved African Americans. Published in 1807, the Bible deletes any passages that may inspire liberation – about 90% of the Old Testament is missing along with half of the New Testament.

    “They literally blacked out, portions of the Bible that had anything to do with freedom, anything to do with equality, anything to do with God delivering folk,” says Leon Harris, a theology professor at Biola University in California.

    There is misconception that Christianity was successfully used to create docile slaves who were conditioned to heed New Testament passages such as “slaves obey your earthly masters.” Malcolm X derided Christianity as a White man’s religion used to brainwash Black people to “shout and sing and pray until we die ‘for some dreamy heaven-in-the-hereafter’” while the White man “has his milk and honey in the streets paved with golden dollars right here on this earth!”

    But historians like Harris say most slaves disdained the type of Christianity that was taught to them. Many instead discovered those missing passages in the Slave Bible, such as the Old Testament stories of God freeing the Israelites from Egyptian captivity. It’s no accident that many Black leaders who have led freedom struggles, from Nat Turner to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., were Christian ministers.

    “Instead of Christianity being a religion of African oppression, many interpreted it as a religion of freedom,” Harris says.

    A

    The historical record shows that enslaved African Americans revitalized Christianity in other ways, historians say. They injected emotionalism and an emphasis on ecstatic worship into evangelical Christianity that can still be seen in how many White Pentecostal worship today. And Negro spirituals, often called the nation’s first musical form unique to America, continue to be sung throughout churches of all races and ethnicities today.

    Former slaves remade Christianity – it didn’t remake them, says Raboteau, author of “Slave Religion.” He wrote that it had a “this-worldly” impact:

    “To describe slave religion as merely otherworldly is inaccurate, for the slaves believed that God had acted, was acting, and would continue to act within human history and within their own particular history as a peculiar people just as long ago he had acted on behalf of another chosen people, biblical Israel,” Raboteau wrote.

    This year, Juneteenth comes at a time when White educators and politicians are passing laws that ban the teaching of Black history in schools that could make White students or others feel “discomfort.” How many students will be able to learn about the resilience of the formerly enslaved?

    That’s a question that no holiday celebration can answer. But one historical debate has been settled:

    Even as the stories of the formerly enslaved are forgotten by history, we live in a contemporary America that was profoundly shaped by how they resisted captivity – whether some of us care to know it or not.

    John Blake is a Senior Writer at CNN and the author of “More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.”

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  • Celebrate Juneteenth by promoting Black health, wealth and joy | CNN

    Celebrate Juneteenth by promoting Black health, wealth and joy | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    June 19, 2023 is the third annual observance of Juneteenth. The federal holiday commemorates June 19, 1865, when the enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned of their emancipation two years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

    Although Juneteenth has recently become more widely recognized, the date has long been a deeply spiritual time of remembrance and celebration for the Black community.

    Across the country, African Americans have rejoiced with fireworks and cookouts, sipping red drinks – a nod to ancestors’ bloodshed and endurance.

    “We know the horrors that we went through,” explained Kleaver Cruz, writer of the forthcoming book “The Black Joy Project” and creator of a digital initiative of the same name. “It’s always concurrent: the joy and the pain. We use one to get through the other.”

    On a particularly joyous note, this June 19, CNN and OWN (both properties of Warner Bros. Discovery) will simulcast Juneteenth: A Global Celebration for Freedom at 8 PM Eastern time. The concert will feature artists across multiple genres including Charlie Wilson, Miguel, Kirk Franklin, Nelly, SWV, Davido, Coi Leray, Jodeci and Mike Phillips. CNN will kick off pre-show coverage at 7 PM Eastern time, highlighting Black advocates, trailblazers, and creators.

    “We get to celebrate our freedoms; we get to celebrate the dismantling of things and lean into what we want in the future,” Cruz said of Juneteenth observance. “We want more of that space and less of the one that harms us.”

    The Black community still struggles with pain and inequity. Impact Your World has gathered ways you can help reject the pathology of racism and thoughtfully celebrate Juneteenth through non-profits that support Black health, wealth, joy, and overall empowerment. You can donate to those charities here.

    For Black Americans, the end of slavery was just the beginning of a 158-year quest for equality. Along the way, the cumulative effect of institutional and systemic racism fomented stark disparities in income, health, education, and opportunity.

    “Those that came before us were physically free but were unable to earn livable wages or receive an education without its share of defeating challenges,” said Marsha Barnes, Founder of The Finance Bar.

    Data collected by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System shows that in the fourth quarter of 2022, the average Black household’s net worth was about one-fourth that of the average White household.

    “Taking the time to address the racial wealth gap highlights many of the roadblocks we as Black Americans currently face,” explained Barnes, a certified financial therapist. She sees the well-documented connection between financial literacy and financial wellness as a key to enhancing wealth in the Black community.

    “We still are at a disadvantage, but it’s important we become comfortable with having to learn while playing the game,” Barnes told CNN.

    HomeFree-USA is a non-profit aiming to close the racial wealth gap by improving financial education, homeownership, and opportunities. Their Center for Financial Advancement (CFA) recruits, trains, and places Historically Black College and University students into internships and careers with mortgage and real estate companies. The goal is to enhance diversity in the financial sector, expose students to credit and money management and help them become savvy consumers and future homeowners.

    The African American Alliance for Homeownership is a non-profit counseling agency that helps families obtain, retain, maintain, and sustain their homes. The organization offers HUD-certified counselors who support first-time homebuyers and foreclosure prevention. The group recently expanded its services to help homeowners with estate plans, resource navigation, home repairs, and energy-efficiency upgrades.

    Former NFL Player Warrick Dunn started Warrick Dunn Charities in 1997 to help single parents buy homes by providing $5,000 down payments and home furnishings.

    “The more I learned, we wanted to get into the business of giving people the potential to break their cycle of poverty,” Dunn explained in a 2021 interview with CNN.

    The non-profit has expanded its priorities to include financial literacy, health and wellness, education attainment, workforce development, and entrepreneurship support.

    The National Urban League is committed to the advancement of African Americans through economic empowerment, equality, and social justice. The organization champions education, job training, workforce development, and civic engagement through community and national initiatives.

    The legacy of racism in America continues to fuel health and healthcare inequities for Black people.

    “We’re seeing diseases that, when I was in medical school, I thought to be diseases that would start to develop in people in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. I’m seeing these diseases sometimes in teenage years,” said Dr. Barbara Joy Jones, an Atlanta-based family medicine physician.

    According to the CDC, five health conditions particularly affect the Black community at higher rates: cardiovascular disease, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), metabolic syndrome, colon cancer, and mental health conditions.

    “I consider hypertension, Diabetes, and obesity the triad,” said Jones.

    The leading contributor to that triad is what you eat.

    “Diet is 80% of health, and just access to quality food and education about food has been very hard,” Jones explained.

    “When you go back and look at slavery, the foods we had to eat were the last scraps, so through the passing down of culture, you’re eating foods that are not the healthiest because it was simply for survival,” said Jones.

    According to Feeding America, eight of the ten US counties with the highest food insecurity rates are at least 60% Black and one in every four Black American children is affected by hunger.

    Addressing food insecurity, nutrition education, and better food access can make a difference.

    Feeding America runs a network of food banks in those mostly Black hard-hit counties.

    Share Our Strength runs a program called Cooking Matters offering cooking classes, grocery store tours, and digital content to help marginalized families across the country shop and cook with an eye towards health and budget.

    The African American Diabetes Association uses targeted outreach projects to help Black people prevent or delay type 2 diabetes.

    Despite progress over the years, racism continues to impact the mental health of African American people.

    “The stress and microaggressions that happen daily for a person of color in the work environment and everyday life add up, and unmitigated stress can lead to disease,” Jones told CNN.

    The Black Mental Health Alliance and the Trevor Project, provide training and networks of mental health providers specifically supportive of the Black and Black LGBTQ communities.

    In 2019, the CDC found that Black people comprised 41% of the new HIV infections in the US. The Black AIDS Institute was founded in 1999 to mobilize and educate Black Americans about HIV/AIDS treatment and care. The Black AIDS Institute advances research, support groups, and education and runs a clinic catering to BIPOC and underserved communities.

    As recently as the 1990’s, unethical medical research was conducted on Black Americans. The Tuskegee Study is one of the most widely recognized examples of the racist practice that led many Black people to distrust the healthcare system and avoid doctors altogether.

    Beyond investing in cultural sensitivity training and prioritizing preventative care, Jones said, “For anti-doctor people, find someone that looks like you; representation matters.”

    “Half of the getting to know your part of medicine is to know why psychosocial and economically you are where you are, and having a doctor that looks like you can support that.”

    Only about 5.7% of US physicians identify as Black or African American, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

    The White Coats Black Doctors Foundation is working to increase diversity in the medical profession, supporting educational preparation to become a doctor and helping offset the costs associated with applying and transitioning to residencies.

    Janice Lloyd of Annapolis, Maryland watches a Juneteenth parade in 2021.

    Black joy has been essential for survival, resistance, and self-development for centuries. But these days, it’s often exploited and misunderstood.

    “I see the ways that Black joy at this moment is being commercialized or co-opted to make it feel like it’s Black people smiling,” lamented Cruz. “It’s much, much deeper than that.”

    Cruz launched the Black Joy Project as a photo essay on social media in 2015 following the deaths of Michael Brown and Sandra Bland to help the Black community process its collective pain.

    “I posted it on Facebook in the stream of consciousness and said, ‘Let us bombard the internet that joy is important too, and as people are sharing these traumatic videos, we have to make space for joy.’ And it was an invitation for anybody else that wanted to do that.”

    Enslaved Black people knew they weren’t free but still hoped their future generations would be. That empowering optimism gave them the will to press forward, no matter the circumstance.

    “This (joy) is just a continuation of those practices,” Cruz said. “Joy is intrinsic. It’s something that can’t be taken from us because it comes within us; it’s always ours to have.”

    Juneteenth is a celebration of freedom, culture, and history, and it’s important to uplift non-profits that positively nourish the arts, music, and all the things that foster Black joy.

    The Robey Theatre Company was founded in 1994 by actors Danny Glover and Ben Guillory to tell the complex stories of the Black experience. The theater showcases and develops up-and-coming actors and playwrights to sustain Black theater.

    The Debbie Allen Dance Academy uses dance, theater, and performance to enrich, inspire and transform students’ lives.

    As some states are moving to block Critical Race Theory and Black history from public education, the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration gives visitors an interactive history lesson on the harsh repercussions of slavery and systemic racism in the US. The immersive exhibition carries visitors through the transatlantic slave trade up to the current mass incarceration of Black people. The museum occupies a site in Montgomery, Alabama where enslaved Black people were historically auctioned off.

    “If we’re being serious about Black joy, that means we’re being serious about Black lives, period,” Cruz concluded.

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  • Man unknowingly buys former plantation house where his ancestors were enslaved | 60 Minutes

    Man unknowingly buys former plantation house where his ancestors were enslaved | 60 Minutes

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    Man unknowingly buys former plantation house where his ancestors were enslaved | 60 Minutes – CBS News


    Watch CBS News



    An Air Force veteran wanted a new house for large family gatherings; he ended up getting an incredible link to his family’s past.

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  • Alabama and Mississippi mark Confederate Memorial Day

    Alabama and Mississippi mark Confederate Memorial Day

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    MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Alabama and Mississippi closed most government offices Monday for Confederate Memorial Day as efforts have stalled to abolish state holidays that honor the old Confederacy.

    Legislation has been introduced in the ongoing Alabama legislative session to remove, alter or rename Confederate-related holidays, but the effort has so far gained little traction.

    Camille Bennett, the founder of Project Say Something, an organization that has worked for the removal of Confederate monuments in Alabama, said the determination to keep Confederate holidays comes at the same time Alabama lawmakers push legislation banning so called “ divisive concepts” from being taught in state classrooms and diversity training for state workers.

    “On one side, you have white conservative men defining what divisive is and what it means. … At the same time, you are honoring the Confederacy, which in itself is a divisive concept. It’s really hypocritical, quite tone deaf,” Bennett said.

    An Alabama Senate committee last week rejected a proposal to separate the joint state holiday celebrating Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and slain civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on the same day.

    “We’re trying to separate the holidays of two men whose ideologies were totally separate, from one end of the totem pole to the other. One believed in justice and fairness for all, and another believed in slavery,” state Sen. Vivian Davis Figures said.

    Figures’ bill would have kept Lee’s holiday but moved it to Columbus Day in October. “Whoever wants to honor either man will have their own day,” she said.

    The vote split along racial lines, Figures said at the end of the meeting, with white Republicans voting against it and Black Democrats voting for it.

    Several Southern states have ended or renamed Confederate holidays. Louisiana in 2022 removed Robert E. Lee Day and Confederate Memorial Day from the list of state holidays. Georgia in 2015 renamed Confederate Memorial Day to “State Holiday.” Arkansas in 2017 ended the practice of commemorating Lee and King on the same day.

    Mississippi Public Broadcasting on Monday had historians read Mississippi’s secession declaration, which makes clear that slavery was the central issue.

    Mary Jane Meadows, a member of the north Mississippi chapter of the Indivisible advocacy group, told Mississippi Public Broadcasting that the group protested Confederate Memorial Day last year and planned to do the same for 2023.

    “That means that 25,000 or more state employees have a day off with pay courtesy of the Mississippi taxpayers, 39% of whom are Black persons who are voters and taxpayers,” Meadows said.

    Some government offices in Mississippi remained open Monday, including courts in majority-Black Hinds County.

    Bennett said she believes the continued recognition of Confederate holidays “speaks to the blatant disregard of the humanity of Black Alabamians.”

    “We experienced a Holocaust, right. We experienced our families being ripped apart, and there is a celebration saying, ‘We wish things could have stayed the same,’ ” Bennett said.

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  • One of King Charles’ relatives pushes for U.K. families that profited from slavery to make amends

    One of King Charles’ relatives pushes for U.K. families that profited from slavery to make amends

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    London — Descendants of some of Britain’s wealthiest slaveowners are calling on the U.K. government to publicly apologize and atone for the country’s historical links to slavery. Several British families are leading the campaign as part of a group called “The Heirs of Slavery,” which is working to shine a light on this country’s deep involvement in the slave trade.

    One of the group’s founders is a second cousin of King Charles III, but the royal family itself — the monarch’s own siblings and offspring — are not directly involved in the effort.

    CBS News met the Earl of Harewood, the British aristocrat who is the king’s second cousin, at his ancestral home, Harewood House. The palatial estate, now open to the public for tours, was built entirely on the profits of the transatlantic slave trade.

    “I’m ashamed that, you know, people behaved in that way, that my ancestors behaved in that way,” Harewood told CBS News. “We’re accountable for that legacy today.”

    Harewood House is full of art that depicts the earl’s aristocratic forebears who grew rich by owning sugar plantations in Jamaica and Barbados that exploited the labor of trafficked Africans.

    uk-heirs-of-slavery.jpg
    The Earl of Harewood, a British aristocrat who is King Charles III’s second cousin, shows CBS News correspondent Holly Williams around his ancestral home, Harewood House, near the northern English city of Leeds.

    CBS News


    When Britain finally outlawed slavery in its colonies in 1834, like other slave owners, Harewood’s ancestors were compensated by the U.K. government, to the tune of around $3 million in today’s money.

    “The slaves who were freed received nothing,” Harewood noted.  

    He has helped to launch the campaign calling for families like his own, that benefited from slavery, to come clean and use their wealth to benefit the descendants of those who were trafficked. He calls it reparative justice.

    “It’s something that people have been very much in denial about — swept it under the carpet, pretended it hadn’t happened,” he told CBS News. He said he couldn’t fully understand the denial by other families, but assumed it likely stems from a sense of guilt or shame.

    Joe Williams is a descendent of British-owned slaves in Jamaica who now leads historical tours exposing how the U.K. profited from slavery. He told CBS News that while it would be impossible for contemporary Britons to truly compensate for the “dehumanization” inflicted on Africans stolen from their homeland hundreds of years ago, it was important for the descendants of both slaves and slaveowners and traders to “work together toward doing what we can.”

    British slave traders trafficked nearly 3.5 million Africans to the Americas, but Williams said many Brits today think and talk about slavery as something that happened in America, not the U.K.

    “I can say, hand on heart, that there are legacies of the transatlantic trade which hold me and many people back from being seen as — in some cases — as human beings,” he said. The problem, he believes, is rooted in education, or a lack thereof.


    Prince Harry book reignites conversation about monarchy’s connection to slave trade

    03:53

    Britain’s royal family undoubtedly has historical links to slavery itself. Historians say it’s impossible to calculate exactly how much wealth the monarchy generated from human trafficking, but some previous kings and queens were directly involved.

    Buckingham Palace announced only this month that it was cooperating with an independent investigation into the monarchy’s connections to slavery. King Charles and his son and heir Prince William have both expressed sadness about those links, including William telling people on a visit to Jamaica last year that, “the appalling atrocity of slavery forever stains our history.”

    Jamaican protesters to demand slavery reparations during Royal Family visit
    Protesters gather outside an office of the British government to demand that the United Kingdom pay reparations for centuries of slavery, in advance of a visit by Prince William and Catherine, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, in Kingston, Jamaica March 22, 2022.

    STRINGER/REUTERS


    “I want to express my profound sorrow,” said the prince. But he, and all other senior members of the family, have always stopped short of an actual apology.

    The official visit to Jamaica by William and his wife Katherine, Princess of Wales, drew demonstrations by people demanding not only an apology, but reparations. The trip was marred not only by the protests, but by images of the royal couple greeting well-wishers through a chain-link fence, which critics said looked like a throwback to the days of colonialism.

    The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge tour of the Caribbean
    Prince William and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, shake hands with children during a visit to Trench Town, the birthplace of reggae music, on day four of the Platinum Jubilee Royal Tour of the Caribbean in Kingston, Jamaica, March 22, 2022.

    Chris Jackson/Pool/REUTERS


    The Earl of Harewood is a great-grandson of King George V, who reigned over Britain until his death in 1936, and a second cousin of King Charles III, who is set to be formally crowned in just a couple weeks.


    What to expect at the coronation of King Charles III

    04:59

    CBS News asked Harewood if he believed his relatives in Buckingham Place should be leading the charge to acknowledge and take full ownership of their collective past.

    “You can never do enough,” he said, “and it’s not something that’s ever going to go away.”

    Joe Williams said if he could speak with King Charles, he’d make the point that Britain, and its royal family, were already off to a late start almost two centuries after slavery was banned across the kingdom’s vast, formal empire.

    “So, I think we need some spearheading to get us ahead of where we should be, rather than behind,” he told CBS News.

    Williams and the Earl of Harewood have already worked together on projects to educate the British public about the country’s historical involvement in slavery.

    And in the ornate halls of Harewood House, the earl has started adding to his impressive art collection, commissioning new portraits of black British community leaders to hang beside his ancestors.

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  • JPMorgan executives knew about sex abuse claims against then-client Jeffery Epstein, court filing alleges | CNN Business

    JPMorgan executives knew about sex abuse claims against then-client Jeffery Epstein, court filing alleges | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    A new court filing alleges JPMorgan Chase executives were aware of sex abuse and trafficking allegations against its then-client Jeffrey Epstein, several years before the financial institution cut ties.

    The latest complaint, part of a lawsuit against the bank filed by the attorney general for the US Virgin Islands (USVI), adds an additional count alleging that JPMorgan obstructed federal law enforcement and prosecuting agencies pursuing Epstein.

    “JP Morgan’s relationship with Epstein in allowing his sex-trafficking venture to access large sums of cash each year went far beyond a normal (and lawful) banking relationship,” the filing says, adding that bank executives were also aware of potentially suspicious cash withdrawals.

    Epstein, 66, was a client of the financial institution until 2013. He was found dead in a New York prison in August 2019.

    Epstein was awaiting trial on federal charges accusing him of operating a sex trafficking ring from 2002 to 2005 at his Manhattan mansion and his Palm Beach estate, in which he paid girls as young as 14 for sex.

    The new complaint against JP Morgan, filed Wednesday, comes days after its CEO Jamie Dimon sat down with CNN’s Poppy Harlow in an exclusive interview.

    Dimon told Harlow that “hindsight is a fabulous gift,” when asked whether the bank should have acted sooner after Epstein entered a guilty plea to soliciting prostitution with a minor in Florida in 2008.

    A JP Morgan spokesperson declined to comment to CNN about the newly filed complaint, which was part of the lawsuit filed in December.

    Attorneys for JP Morgan have denied the allegations. They accused the USVI government of looking for “deeper pockets,” according to court filings.

    The amended complaint details internal email exchanges and documents, alleging several examples that refute Dimon’s suggestion that the financial institution needed “hindsight” regarding Epstein.

    According to the filing, JPMorgan executive Mary Erdoes “admitted in her deposition that JPMorgan was aware by 2006 that Epstein was accused of paying cash to have underage girls and young women brought to his home.”

    “Mary Erdoes testified that JP Morgan terminated Epstein as a customer in 2013 after she became aware that the withdrawals were ‘actual cash,’” the filing alleged. Erdoes’ deposition was taken last month.

    In addition, the filing claims that the JPMorgan Rapid Response Team noted in 2006 that Epstein “routinely” made cash withdrawals in amounts from $40,000 to $80,000 several times per month, totaling over $750,000 per year. Officials concluded that year that “his account ‘should be classified as high risk’ and require special approval.”

    Internal emails quoted in the filing show JP Morgan employees including senior executives discussed coverage of the Epstein allegations for years after 2006 until he was terminated as a client seven years later. High level bank officials also met about Epstein’s account and the allegations against him as far back as 2008, according to the court filing.

    In 2010, the company’s risk management division flagged Epstein’s official status as a sex offender. That was two years after he pleaded guilty to solicitation of prostitution with a minor in 2008 and spent about 13 months in prison.

    “See below new allegations of an investigation related to child trafficking – are you still comfortable with this client who is now a registered sex offender,” according to an email in the newly unredacted portions of the court filing.

    Ghislaine Maxwell, a longtime confidante of Epstein’s who was also a JP Morgan client, was flagged in 2011 by the bank’s anti-money laundering compliance director when she allegedly sought to open an account for a “personal recruitment consulting business.”

    “What does she mean by personal recruitment? Are you sure this will have nothing to do with Jeffrey? If you want to proceed, I suggest that we flag this as a High Risk Client,” the director wrote in an internal email.

    Also that year, a senior compliance official reviewing JP Morgan’s information on Epstein called him a “sugar daddy,” noting his sponsorship of private bank accounts and credit cards for two 18-year-olds “that appear to be part of his inner entourage,” the lawsuit says.

    Last month, a federal district judge presiding over the case in Manhattan ruled that the lawsuit against JPMorgan could move forward, partially denying the bank’s motion to dismiss the suit.

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  • King Charles III supports investigation into monarchy’s links to slavery, Buckingham Palace says

    King Charles III supports investigation into monarchy’s links to slavery, Buckingham Palace says

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    King Charles III for the first time has signaled support for research into the British monarchy’s ties to slavery after a document showed an ancestor with shares in a slave-trading company, a Buckingham Palace spokesperson said Thursday.

    Charles takes the issue “profoundly seriously” and academics will be given access to the royal collection and archives, the palace said.

    The statement was in response to an article in The Guardian newspaper that revealed a document showing that the deputy governor of the slave-trading Royal African Company transferred 1,000 pounds of shares in the business to King William III in 1689.

    King Charles III And The Queen Consort Attend The Royal Maundy Service
    King Charles III attends the Royal Maundy Service at York Minster on April 6, 2023, in York, England. 

    Getty Images


    The newspaper reported on the document as part of a series of stories on royal wealth and finances, as well as the monarchy’s connection to slavery.

    In his recent memoir “Spare,” Prince Harry wrote that the monarchy rests upon wealth generated by “exploited workers and thuggery, annexation and enslaved people.”

    Esther Stanford-Xosei, a lawyer and reparations expert, told CBS News in January that it is believed the British monarchy was “heavily involved” in the financing of enslavement, including the voyages of slave traffickers between Africa, Europe and the Americas.

    Stanford-Xosei explained that James II, the Duke of York in the 17th century, was the governor of the Royal African Company, which was involved in transporting enslaved Africans.

    “They also found ways of branding African people with the inscription ‘DY,’ for Duke of York,” Stanford-Xosei said.

    Charles and his eldest son, Prince William, have expressed their sorrow over slavery but haven’t acknowledged the crown’s connections to the trade.

    In March of 2022, Prince William and Kate, the Princess of Wales, were met by protesters during a visit to Jamaica, who demanded an apology for the monarchy’s role in slavery, along with reparations from the United Kingdom.

    “The appalling atrocity of slaver forever stains our history,” William said during the visit. “I want to express my profound sorrow.”

    The king has said he’s trying to deepen his understanding of “slavery’s enduring impact” that runs deep in the Commonwealth, an international grouping of countries made up mostly of former British colonies.

    During a ceremony that marked Barbados becoming a republic two years ago, Charles referred to “the darkest days of our past and the appalling atrocity of slavery, which forever stains our history.” English settlers used African slaves to turn the island into a wealthy sugar colony.

    The research into the monarchy’s ties to slavery is co-sponsored by Historic Royal Palaces and Manchester University and is expected to be completed by 2026.

    Charles ascended to the throne last year after the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II. His coronation is planned for May 6.

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  • Reparations for Black Californians could top $800 billion

    Reparations for Black Californians could top $800 billion

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    SAN FRANCISCO — It could cost California more than $800 billion to compensate Black residents for generations of over-policing, disproportionate incarceration and housing discrimination, economists have told a state panel considering reparations.

    The preliminary estimate is more than 2.5 times California’s $300 billion annual budget, and does not include a recommended $1 million per older Black resident for health disparities that have shortened their average life span. Nor does the figure count compensating people for property unjustly taken by the government or devaluing Black businesses, two other harms the task force says the state perpetuated.

    Black residents may not receive cash payments anytime soon, if ever, because the state may never adopt the economists’ calculations. The reparations task force is scheduled to discuss the numbers Wednesday and can vote to adopt the suggestions or come up with its own figures. The proposed number comes from a consulting team of five economists and policy experts.

    “We’ve got to go in with an open mind and come up with some creative ways to deal with this,” said Assembly member Reggie Jones-Sawyer, one of two lawmakers on the task force responsible for mustering support from state legislators and Gov. Gavin Newsom before any reparations could become reality.

    In an interview prior to the meeting, Jones-Sawyer said he needed to consult budget analysts, other legislators and the governor’s office before deciding whether the scale of payments is feasible.

    The estimates for policing and disproportionate incarceration and housing discrimination are not new. The figures came up in a September presentation as the consulting team sought guidance on whether to use a national or California-specific model to calculate damages.

    But the task force must now settle on a cash amount as it nears a July 1 deadline to recommend to lawmakers how California can atone for its role in perpetuating racist systems that continue to undermine Black people.

    For those who support reparations, the staggering $800 billion amount economists suggest underscores the long-lasting harm Black Americans have endured, even in a state that never officially endorsed slavery. Critics pin their opposition partly on the fact that California was never a slave state and say current taxpayers should not be responsible for damage linked to events that germinated hundreds of years ago.

    Task force recommendations are just the start because ultimate authority rests with the state Assembly, Senate and the governor.

    “That’s going to be the real hurdle,” said Sen. Steven Bradford, who sits on the panel. “How do you compensate for hundreds of years of harm, even 150 years post-slavery?”

    Financial redress is just one part of the package being considered. Other proposals include paying incarcerated inmates market value for their labor, establishing free wellness centers and planting more trees in Black communities, banning cash bail and adopting a K-12 Black studies curriculum.

    Gov. Newsom signed legislation in 2020 creating the reparations task force after national protests over the death of George Floyd, a Black man, at the hands of Minneapolis police. While federal initiatives have stalled, cities, counties and other institutions have stepped in.

    An advisory committee in San Francisco has recommended $5 million payouts, as well as guaranteed income of at least $97,000 and personal debt forgiveness for qualifying individuals. Supervisors expressed general support, but stopped short of endorsing specific proposals. They will take up the issue later this year.

    The statewide estimate includes $246 billion to compensate eligible Black Californians whose neighborhoods were subjected to aggressive policing and prosecution of Black people in the “war on drugs” from 1970 to 2020. That would translate to nearly $125,000 for every person who qualifies.

    The numbers are approximate, based on modeling and population estimates. The economists also included $569 billion to make up for the discriminatory practice of redlining in housing loans. Such compensation would amount to about $223,000 per eligible resident who lived in California from 1933 to 1977. The aggregate is considered a maximum and assumes all 2.5 million people who identify as Black in California would be eligible.

    Redlining officially began in the 1930s when the federal government started backing mortgages to support homebuying, but excluded majority Black neighborhoods by marking them red on internal maps. The racial gap in homeownership persists today, and Black-owned homes are frequently undervalued. Redlining officially ended in 1977, but the practice persisted.

    Monetary redress will be available to people who meet residency and other requirements. They must also be descendants of enslaved and freed Black people in the U.S. as of the 19th century, which leaves out Black immigrants.

    In their report, the consultants suggest the state task force “err on the side of generosity” and consider a down-payment with more money to come as more evidence becomes available.

    “It should be communicated to the public that the substantial initial down-payment is the beginning of a conversation about historical injustices, not the end of it,” they said.

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  • Today in History: March 20, Menendez brothers convicted

    Today in History: March 20, Menendez brothers convicted

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    Today in History

    Today is Monday, March 20, the 79th day of 2023. There are 286 days left in the year.

    Today’s Highlight in History:

    On March 20, 1996, a jury in Los Angeles convicted Erik and Lyle Menendez of first-degree murder in the shotgun slayings of their wealthy parents. (They were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.)

    On this date:

    In 1413, England’s King Henry IV died; he was succeeded by Henry V.

    In 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte returned to Paris after escaping his exile on Elba, beginning his “Hundred Days” rule.

    In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influential novel about slavery, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” was first published in book form after being serialized.

    In 1854, the Republican Party of the United States was founded by slavery opponents at a schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin.

    In 1922, the decommissioned USS Jupiter, converted into the first U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, was recommissioned as the USS Langley.

    In 1952, the U.S. Senate ratified, 66-10, a Security Treaty with Japan.

    In 1969, John Lennon married Yoko Ono in Gibraltar.

    In 1976, kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst was convicted of armed robbery for her part in a San Francisco bank holdup carried out by the Symbionese Liberation Army. (Hearst was sentenced to seven years in prison; she was released after serving 22 months, and was pardoned in 2001 by President Bill Clinton.)

    In 1995, in Tokyo, 12 people were killed, more than 5,500 others sickened when packages containing the deadly chemical sarin were leaked on five separate subway trains by Aum Shinrikyo (ohm shin-ree-kyoh) cult members.

    In 2014, President Barack Obama ordered economic sanctions against nearly two dozen members of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle and a major bank that provided them support, raising the stakes in an East-West showdown over Ukraine.

    In 2020, the governor of Illinois ordered residents to remain in their homes except for essential needs, joining similar efforts in California and New York to limit the spread of the coronavirus. Stocks tumbled again on Wall Street, ending their worst week since the 2008 financial crisis; the Dow fell more than 900 points to end the week with a 17% loss.

    Ten years ago: Making his first visit to Israel since taking office, President Barack Obama affirmed Israel’s sovereign right to defend itself from any threat and vowed to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Five former elected officials of Bell, California, were convicted of misappropriating public funds by paying themselves huge salaries while raising taxes on residents; one defendant was acquitted. Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper signed bills that put sweeping new restrictions on sales of firearms and ammunition.

    Five years ago: Investigators pursuing a suspected serial bombing in Austin, Texas, shifted attention to a FedEx shipping center near San Antonio, where a package had exploded. In a phone call to Vladimir Putin, President Donald Trump offered congratulations on Putin’s re-election victory; a senior official said Trump had been warned in briefing materials that he should not congratulate Putin.

    One year ago: Ukrainian authorities said Russia’s military bombed an art school sheltering about 400 people in the port city of Mariupol, where refugees described how “battles took place over every street,” weeks into a devastating siege. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on Israel to take a stronger stand against Russia, delivering an emotional appeal that compared Russia’s invasion of his country to the actions of Nazi Germany. Yemen’s Houthi rebels unleashed an intense barrage of drone and missile strikes on Saudi Arabia’s critical energy facilities, sparking a fire at one site and temporarily cutting oil production at another. The salvo marked a serious escalation of rebel attacks on the kingdom as the war in Yemen raged into its eighth year.

    Today’s Birthdays: Actor Hal Linden is 92. Former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney is 84. Basketball Hall of Fame coach Pat Riley is 78. Country singer-musician Ranger Doug (Riders in the Sky) is 77. Hockey Hall of Famer Bobby Orr is 75. Blues singer-musician Marcia Ball is 74. Rock musician Carl Palmer (Emerson, Lake and Palmer) is 73. Rock musician Jimmie Vaughan is 72. Actor Amy Aquino is 66. Movie director Spike Lee is 66. Actor Theresa Russell is 66. Actor Vanessa Bell Calloway is 66. Actor Holly Hunter is 65. Rock musician Slim Jim Phantom (The Stray Cats) is 62. Actor-model-designer Kathy Ireland is 60. Actor David Thewlis is 60. Rock musician Adrian Oxaal (James) is 58. Actor Jessica Lundy is 57. Actor Liza Snyder is 55. Actor Michael Rapaport is 53. Actor Alexander Chaplin is 52. Actor Cedric Yarbrough is 50. Actor Paula Garcés is 49. Actor Bianca Lawson is 44. Comedian-actor Mikey Day is 43. Actor Nick Blood (TV: “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”) is 41. Rock musician Nick Wheeler (The All-American Rejects) is 41. Actor Michael Cassidy is 40. Actor-singer Christy Carlson Romano is 39. Actor Ruby Rose is 37. Actor Barrett Doss is 34.

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  • South Korean leader lands in Japan for first visit in 12 years for fence-mending summit | CNN

    South Korean leader lands in Japan for first visit in 12 years for fence-mending summit | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol arrived in Japan Thursday for a fence-mending summit, the first such visit in 12 years as the two neighbors seek to confront growing threats from North Korea to rising concerns about China.

    Those shared security challenges were on stark display just hours before the trip when North Korea fired a long-range ballistic missile into the waters off the east coast of the Korean Peninsula – the fourth intercontinental ballistic missile launch in less than one year.

    Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno condemned the latest launch, calling it a “reckless act” that “threatens the peace and security of our country, the region, and the international community.”

    The summit between Yoon and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is a crucial step to mend frayed ties after decades of disputes and mistrust between two crucial US allies in Asia.

    Yoon’s office has hailed it “an important milestone” in the development of bilateral relations.

    The two East Asian neighbors have a long history of acrimony, dating back to Japan’s colonial occupation of the Korean Peninsula a century ago.

    The two normalized relations in 1965, but unresolved historical disputes have continued to fester, in particular over colonial Japan’s use of forced labor and so-called “comfort women” sex slaves.

    In recent years the often fraught relations have undermined efforts by the United States to present a united front against North Korea – and the growing assertiveness of Beijing.

    Now, the region’s two most important allies for the US appear ready to turn a new page in bilateral ties.

    Much of that is driven by deepening security concerns about Pyongyang’s ever more frequent missile tests, China’s increasingly aggressive military posturing and tensions across the Taiwan Strait – an area both Tokyo and Seoul say is vital to their respective security.

    Before departing for Tokyo, Yoon told international media on Wednesday “there is an increasing need for Korea and Japan to cooperate in this time of a polycrisis,” citing escalating North Korean nuclear and missile threats and the disruption of global supply chains.

    “We cannot afford to waste time while leaving strained Korea-Japan relations unattended,” Yoon said.

    Analysts say this outreach is a break from the past.

    Under Yoon’s predecessor Moon Jae-in, South Korea’s relationship with Japan was “openly combative,” said Joel Atkinson, a professor specializing in Northeast Asian international politics at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul.

    “So this visit is significant, sending a strong signal that under the Yoon administration, both sides are now working much more cooperatively,” Atkinson said.

    The thaw in relations comes after South Korea took a major step toward resolving a long-running dispute that plunged ties to their lowest point in decades.

    Last week, South Korea announced it would compensate victims of forced labor under Japan’s occupation from 1910 to 1945 through a public foundation funded by private Korean companies – instead of asking Japanese firms to contribute to the reparations.

    The move was welcomed by Japan and hailed by US President Joe Biden as “a groundbreaking new chapter of cooperation and partnership between two of the United States’ closest allies.”

    The deal broke a deadlock reached in 2018, when South Korea’s Supreme Court ordered two Japanese companies to compensate 15 plaintiffs who sued them over forced labor during Japan’s colonial rule.

    Japan did not agree with the South Korean court’s 2018 decision, and no compensation had been paid by Tokyo.

    That led to rising tensions between the two sides, with Japan restricting exports of materials used in memory chips, and South Korea scrapping its military intelligence-sharing agreement with Tokyo during the presidency of Moon.

    But the Yoon administration has been striving to improve relations between Seoul and Tokyo – even if it means pushing back against domestic public pressure on contentious, highly emotional issues like the compensation plan.

    Apart from the growing North Korean nuclear threat, China appears to have been a big factor in Yoon’s willingness to face the domestic backlash over the compensation deal, said Atkinson, the expert in Seoul.

    “The administration is making the case to the South Korean public that this is not just about Japan, it is about engaging with a wider coalition of liberal democracies,” he said.

    “What South Koreans perceive as Beijing’s bullying, arrogant treatment of their country, as well as its crushing of the Hong Kong protests, threats toward Taiwan and so on, have definitely prepared the ground for that.”

    Even before the pivotal move to settle the historical dispute, Seoul and Tokyo have signaled their willingness to put the past behind them and foster closer relations.

    On March 1, in a speech commemorating the 104th anniversary of South Korea’s protest movement against Japan’s colonial occupation, Yoon said Japan had “transformed from a militaristic aggressor of the past into a partner” that “shares the same universal values.”

    Since taking office, the two leaders have embarked on a flurry of diplomatic activities toward mending bilateral ties – and deepening their joint cooperation with Washington.

    In September, Yoon and Kishida held the first summit between the two countries since 2019 in New York on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, where they agreed to improve relations.

    In November, the two leaders met Biden in Cambodia at a regional summit, where they “commended the unprecedented level of trilateral coordination” and “resolved to forge still-closer trilateral links, in the security realm and beyond.”

    Closer alignment among the US, Japan and South Korea is an alarming development to China, which has accused Washington of leading a campaign to contain and suppress its development.

    Beijing is particularly worried about the involvement of South Korea in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue – better known as “the Quad” – an informal security dialogue among the US, Japan, Australia and India. It views the grouping as part of Washington’s attempt to encircle the country with strategic and military allies.

    Last week, a senior South Korean official said Seoul plans to “proactively accelerate” its participation in the Quad working group.

    “Although we have not yet joined the Quad, the Yoon Suk Yeol government has been emphasizing its importance in terms of its Indo-Pacific strategy,” the official told reporters during a visit to Washington, D.C., Yonhap reported.

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