UK philanthropist donates US$500,000 to UWI as personal reparation

A UK philanthropist, musician Bridget Freeman, has donated properties worth US$500,000 to UWI's Global Giving Fund as personal reparations for the slave trade.

In a release, UWI said Freeman is an accomplished musician who has lived in the UK for most of her life. Before viewing a series about the Atlantic slave trade on the BBC, she knew almost nothing about the plight of free Africans who boarded ships and were taken throughout the world and sold into slavery.

“I was horrified and it touched me, and I thought, ‘Dear God, this is not right.’”

Some of her relatives left the UK for the Caribbean, among them her mother’s brother, Billy Hopkins.

“As the story goes, ‘Uncle Billy,’ the last Master of the King’s Music in Ireland, became a priest and migrated to Barbados, where he married Marion, a local Barbadian woman whose family were plantation and slave owners — another revelation that horrified Bridget Freeman.”

UWI said with the assistance of her former sister-in-law and late husband, Freeman made a bold and remarkable decision about her legacy.

“My late husband said: ‘You’ve got to do the right thing.’ There was always a feeling of what do I do with all I have. The young people in the family are doing all right and they don’t need a step-up.”

In addition to donating her properties, Freeman said her grand piano is being kept in tune for the Cave Hill campus as a contribution to the university’s new Faculty of Culture, Creative and Performing Arts.

Freeman’s research led her to UWI’s Global Giving Fund, chaired by Elizabeth Buchanan Hind. The release said the fund is the regional university’s annual crowdfunding campaign which was established in 2016. Each year the campaign kicks off on August 1 which, in many Caribbean territories, is the observance of Emancipation Day, marking the freedom of enslaved Africans who were victims of the transatlantic slave trade.

UWI said while it "honours and pays tribute to that past, it recognises that education is one of the most critical means to freedom and propelling regional development. Under the theme Emancipate, Educate, Donate, UWI Global Giving is grounded in the UWI’s vision to facilitate an ‘access revolution’ for higher education in the Caribbean, calling on the support of regional and international alumni, partners, the diaspora and friends to give.”

UWI vice-chancellor Prof Sir Hilary Beckles said the university community welcomes Freeman’s generous endowment, describing it as “an honourable demonstration of personal reparation and moral leadership on behalf of her family.”

He said her commitment to turning her awareness into action is deeply appreciated and will go a long way in providing freedom and fulfilment through the gift of education for many Caribbean students.

UWI said, “Now in her late 70s, Bridget Freeman’s care, research, and warm conscience led her to becoming an unlikely philanthropist and accepting UWI’s invitation to get involved as a co-patron of Global Giving 2021.

Freeman said “It is about reparation. We owe it. Once you see the ships of the slave trade, the giving back just seems so obvious.”