Grenadian scholar and community activist Prof. Martin Felix is not letting up in his bid for reparatory justice for the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.
As the featured speaker during the recent two-day International Homecoming at St. Paul’s Church in the Village of Flatbush, Brooklyn, Prof. Felix, a Brooklyn resident, addressed the history of the church in the enslavement of Africans, under the theme “Justice, Reconciliation, and Repair: Confronting Our History.”
“I believe that knowledge of the past provides a firm foundation for a more just and peaceful future,“ he said. “My frame is that slavery is individual and institutional sins; reparations are individual and institutional atonement.
“Sin is an offense that separates us from God; atonement is the means by which sin and its consequences are forgiven and reconciled with God,“ added Prof. Felix, an adjunct professor in Caribbean Studies and coordinator of the Caribbean Studies Minor, Department of Social Sciences, Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), State University of New York (SUNY). “Reparations provide us with this opportunity.”
“At its simplest, reparations mean repairing a wrong that has been done,“ he continued. “Those who commit crimes against humanity are morally and legally bound to make amends. In our case, the crime is clear: the capture, sale, and trafficking of our African ancestors across the Atlantic, and their chattel enslavement in the Americas.
“This was not only forced labor—it was the stripping away of humanity, culture, and dignity,“ Prof. Felix said.
In Grenada, he noted that the first French Catholic Dominican priest arrived in 1650—the same year as the massacre of the Kalinago people at Sauteurs, “an event we must never forget.”
Later, in 1784, Prof. Felix said the first baptisms and burials were recorded in St. George’s Anglican Church in Grenada in the aftermath of the massacre of the Fedon rebels, who rose against slavery.
“Whenever I teach Caribbean history, I begin with our Indigenous ancestors—not only out of respect, but because they are central to our story,“ he said. “What happened to them cannot be glossed over. It is an original sin.“
Turning to the Bible, Prof. Felix said the prophet Isaiah, in chapter 1, verse 17, tells us: “Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.“
In this context, Prof. Felix said: “Isaiah condemns religious hypocrisy. God refuses offerings from people whose ‘hands are full of blood.‘ In other words, worship without justice is meaningless.
“This should give us pause, because, when the church aids, abets, or ignores oppression—as it did in much of the age of slavery—it becomes handicapped,“ he added. “And when the church fails to atone, it compounds the harm.
“I am not here simply to condemn the church, because the story is complex,“ he continued. “The church was also involved in the abolition of slavery and, today, many congregations—including yours—are seeking truth and reconciliation. But we cannot look away from the institutional sins of the past.“
Prof. Felix said, “Many branches of the church did not just witness slavery; they participated in it.“
He said the Anglican and Episcopal Churches in Virginia, for example, owned enslaved people as institutions.
He said enslaved laborers worked church-owned lands and sometimes rented out to parish ministers.
“These ‘institutional slaves‘ were often worse off than those owned by individuals, because those who controlled them had no long-term interest in their well-being,“ Prof. Felix said.
He said the Episcopal Church in the United States and its sister Church of England in the Caribbean built wealth from slavery.
For example, Prof. Felix said Codrington College in Barbados was funded by the profits of two sugar plantations bequeathed to the church.
On those plantations, he said, enslaved Africans were branded with the word “Society”—because they belonged to the church’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.
Prof. Felix said Codrington plantations generated an estimated £5m a year in today’s money and covered 763 acres.
He said records show that the Archbishop of Canterbury approved funds to buy enslaved people in British settler colonies in the 18th century.
The Grenadian-born scholar said slavery was also interwoven throughout settler colonial societies.
In November 2023, he said Lloyd’s of London insurance market was part of “a sophisticated network of financial interests and activities“ that made transatlantic slavery possible.
He said research commissioned in 2020 found John Edward Taylor, the journalist and cotton merchant who founded the Manchester Guardian in 1821, and at least nine of his 11 backers had links to chattel slavery.
He also noted that the Bank of England presented new research in an exhibition in 2022 that it had owned 599 enslaved people in the 1770s after taking possession of two plantations in Grenada.
“Even scripture was twisted to justify oppression,“ Prof. Felix posited. “And, after emancipation, Black congregations often faced discrimination within white-led Episcopal churches.“
He said reparations are not only about money but ” about truth, justice, and repair.”
Globally, Prof. Felix said this is recognized as a debt, noting that the United Nations has declared this the Decade for People of African Descent, with the theme, “Recognition, Justice, and Development.”
He lamented that about 12 – 15 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic as part of the slave trade, though only about 10.7 million survived the journey and disembarked in the Americas.
Prof. Felix said the majority of these individuals, over 90 %, were sent to the Caribbean and South America, with a much smaller fraction, around 388,000, directly arriving in North America.
He noted that the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) has developed a 10-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice, sharing some of its pillars: A full formal apology; development for Indigenous people; repatriation; building cultural institutions; public health investment; education and literacy; African knowledge programs; psychological rehabilitation; technology transfer; and debt cancellation.
Prof. Felix said CARICOM’s 10-point plan seeks justice from 11 European countries – France, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark, Belgium, and Norway.
“These demands are not fantasies. They are researched, debated, and supported by evidence—like the recent Brattle Report, which calculated the economic cost of slavery to our nation,“ he said. “One of the realities of chattel slavery is that it was a business. So, there is a lot of evidence, through receipts, ledgers, court records, etc.“
He noted that some nations have taken steps in atoning for the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Chattel Slavery.
For example, Prof. Felix said the Netherlands and Belgium have offered apologies, and Britain has offered “expressions of regret,“ but not a formal apology.
“To us, reparations is not pity or helplessness or the US being welfare ‘Queens and Kings‘”, he said. “Transatlantic Slavery was characterized by the profound and ubiquitous resistance of the enslaved, slave uprisings and rebellions.
“And Caribbean countries and African countries have been striving for development, individual and collective, against great odds,“ he added. “But we are talking about stolen legacy and stolen wealth.
“The church cannot undo the past, but it can speak truth, seek justice, and act with courage,“ Prof. Felix continued. “By acknowledging its complicity, committing to repair, and standing with movements for justice, the church can live out the gospel.
“I commend Pastor (the Rev.) Sheldon Hamblin (the Barbadian-born rector at The Church of St. Paul’s in the Village of Flatbush) and this congregation for opening this space of truth and atonement,“ he said. “These are not easy conversations, but they are holy ones.”
