The Greene King pub chain and the Lloyd’s of London insurance market were two major British companies included in a database of companies connected to slavery compiled by University College London.
The two companies’ decision comes following days of global protests over the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who was murdered by white cops in Minneapolis.
Founded in 1799 by Benjamin Greene, Greene King was one of 47,000 people who benefited from compensation paid to slave owners when slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833.
In particular, we are sorry for the role played by Lloyd’s market in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century slave trade — an appalling and shameful period of English history, as well as our own.”
“Recent events have shone a spotlight on the inequality that black people have experienced over many years as a result of systematic and structural racism that has existed in many aspects of society and unleashed difficult conversations that were long overdue,” the market said in a statement.p
Protesters in England’s southwestern port of Bristol pulled down a bronze statue of 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston and dumped it in the local harbor earlier this month.
