As an Area Meeting we have agreed to reflect on what the exploration of our Meeting’s history has taught us about Friends’ involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and the wealth generated in the Lancaster area through slave trading and slave labour in the Caribbean.
We are doing this in parallel with BYM's discernment that we should work towards becoming an antiracist church.
Two of the key questions before us are:
What positive action should we take to express our deep regret over our Meeting's historical actions?
How can we work towards repairing the broken relationships and inequality that are the legacy of this history?
As a first step, a group of us decided to undertake a journey of learning - reading and listening together, and inviting input from the people most affected in the present day by our Quaker predecessors' actions in the past.
We started this journey in autumn 2023 and we hope to make our first report on both what we have learned and what we have discerned by April 2024. We expect the journey to continue beyond then as the Area Meeting as a whole considers what actions to take.
As we have studied, we have started to collect resources that we hope will be useful to others, both in and beyond North Lancashire and South Cumbria. The collection is still developing but we hope people will explore the resources, linked below.
The Journey for Learning is being coordinated by Ann Morgan and Phil Chandler and enquiries about the programme should be addressed to them.
Questions about the web pages? Email Lisa Whistlecroft direct if you know her email address, otherwise via the 'Contact us' button on the Bailrigg Local Meeting site.
Slavery, wealth, justice and reparation (also accessible direct from the dropdown from 'Journey for Learning' in the Area Meeting menu bar) will take you to an annotated list of links to various resources (websites, reports, articles, videos, audio and written interviews, books etc.) that we have found interesting, including resources provided by BYM and Woodbrooke.