US$50,000 to UWI Global Giving as personal reparation

It was a series about the Atlantic slave trade on the BBC that shocked Bridget Freeman. Up until then, 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,” she said.

Mrs. Freeman, an accomplished musician, was born in the United Kingdom of Irish background, and adopted at the end of World War II by a couple in their 40s. She has lived in the UK for most of her life. However, some of her relatives left the UK for the Caribbean. One such, was 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.

“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 alright and they don’t need a step-up”, said Mrs. Freeman. Further research led her to The UWI and its Executive Director of Institutional Advancement, Mrs. Elizabeth Buchanan Hind.

Bridget Freeman bequeathed her properties worth half a million US dollars (US$500,000) to The UWI, through its Global Giving 2021 campaign, and noted that 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.

Vice-Chancellor Beckles described it as “a seminal moment in the regional reparations movement. Bridget Freeman should be celebrated as a citizen who has broken ranks with British white supremacy, conservatism and has become an activist reparationist.” He continued, “Bridget has accepted her responsibility and willingness to be held accountable. In this regard, she is a reparations hero, and we hope that the millions of other British citizens in her position will step up, come forward, and participate in the healing and development that is reparations. The reparation investment will be directed to needy students in order to sustain the access revolution that is central to Caribbean development and to the University’s strategic plan.”