They had unbolted the statue of Edward Colston, a slave trader from the end of the 17th century.e century, on the sidelines of an anti-racism demonstration in Bristol. Three men and a woman, aged 21 to 36, were released Wednesday January 5 by the British justice. They had admitted their participation in the facts but had contested the tortious nature of their acts and pleaded not guilty for the degradations with which they were accused.
“The truth is that the defendants should never have been prosecuted”, reacted Raj Chada, lawyer of one of the defendants, Jake Skuse, “It is shameful that the Municipality of Bristol did not remove the statue of the slaver Edward Colston which so shocked the people of Bristol, and just as shameful that they subsequently supported the prosecution”.
100,000 slaves sold
On June 7, 2020, the statue of Colston was overturned and then thrown into the waters of the Avon, the river that crosses the city, during demonstrations caused by the death, at the end of May of the same year, of George Floyd, a black American killed by a white policeman in the United States. The damage had been assessed at 4,000 pounds sterling (nearly 4,700 euros).
The statue was then recovered by local authorities. A year after her debunking, she had been at the center of a temporary exhibition in Bristol dedicated to the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United Kingdom.
Edward Colston had enriched himself in the slave trade. He is said to have sold 100,000 West African slaves in the Caribbean and the Americas between 1672 and 1689, before using his fortune to finance the development of Bristol, including schools and orphanages, which has long earned him a reputation as a philanthropist.
The maintenance of this statue had been debated for years. A cultural center, Colston Hall, and a girls’ school, Colston’s Girls’School, have changed their names.