Liverpool confronting its links to slavery

LIVERPOOL, England — Beatles lovers who seek out Penny Lane imagine it as that magical place "in my ears and in my eyes, there beneath the blue suburban skies." But it has a sinister undertone that still reverberates.

The street in Liverpool, home town of the Fab Four, is named after James Penny, a slave trader and investor in 11 voyages that took 500 to 600 captives at a time to the New World.

Penny was among the many who enriched themselves and their city on human trafficking until the slave trade was abolished 200 years ago. Their ships carried millions of human beings from West Africa to the plantations of the Americas in a triangular trade that also brought profitable cargoes of sugar, tobacco and rum to England.

Liverpool's rise, says local historian Ray Costello, is summed up in the carving on a bank facade: two black children supporting a figure of the Roman god Neptune, representing Liverpool.

"What it really means is that this bank was founded on the slave trade," Costello said.

It resonates all the more with the approach of the March 25 anniversary of the British parliamentary act that abolished the slave trade in Britain's colonies 200 years ago — though not slavery itself.

Liverpool's problem is its "hidden history — nobody wants to talk about it," said Eric Lynch, a black Liverpudlian who leads walking tours in the west coast city.

However, the past has not gone unacknowledged.

The city council formally apologized in 1999, expressing "shame and remorse for the city's role in this trade in human misery."

It has commissioned statues titled "Reconciliation," two abstract bronze figures embracing, which will be dedicated this year in Richmond, Va., and Benin, a West African port of call for Liverpool's slave ships.

On Aug. 23, the anniversary of the slave uprising in French-ruled Haiti in 1791, Liverpool will open the International Slavery Museum. Part of its mission is recovering Liverpool's history, which remains a fraught issue.

Lynch, the tour guide, finds the echoes in the streets named for slave traders — Bamber, Banastre, Cunliffe, Gascoyne, Oldham, Seel, Tarleton; in a balcony railing made of chains by one of the businesses that depended on the trade; in the face of an African woman in the frieze around the ornate Town Hall.