Laura Trevelyan and the gathering momentum for reparations

The trans-Atlantic slave trade. Image from the Grenada National Museum

News that longtime BBC journalist Laura Trevelyan has presented her last @BBCWorld News America show would normally be an item in a newspaper or website’s media round-up/gossip section.

It isn’t. Ms Trevelyan’s departure from the broadcaster is a rather remarkable story about the campaign for reparatory justice and how it is gathering momentum.

Ms Trevelyan, who belongs to a family that profited from the labour of more than 1,000 slaves across six sugar plantations on Grenada, has left her BBC job for an uncertain if idealistic mission. As a “roving advocate for reparatory justice,” she will use her professional skills as a storyteller and the authority (and no doubt painfully acquired self-knowledge) of a descendant of slaveowners to speak for reparations.

Her new role is about “confronting the past,” in the phrase Ms Trevelyan used in the documentary she made last year for the BBC on Grenada. (The 26-minute documenta…