Hundreds of people assembled in Brixton, a centre for the Black community in south London, to demand reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans.
Gatekeepers News reports that on Sunday, Black people whose right to live in the U.K. was illegally challenged by the government, marked the anniversary of the act that freed slaves throughout the British Empire.
The people demanded legislation to compensate legal U.K. residents who were threatened with deportation in what is known as the Windrush Scandal.
The Windrush Generation are citizens of the British Empire who travelled to Britain between 1948 and 1973 after the government called on its colonies to send workers to help rebuild the country after World War II. The name was coined from the ship that transported the first migrants from the Caribbean in 1948.
The Windrush scandal has rocked Britain since 2018, when many of these long-term legal residents were caught up in a crackdown on illegal immigration.
Thousands lost their jobs, homes and the right to free medical care, many because they arrived as children and couldn’t produce paperwork proving their right to live in the U.K. Some were detained, and an unknown number were deported to countries they hardly recalled.
A program designed to compensate victims has been plagued by complaints that it is too slow, too cumbersome and the payments offered aren’t high enough to make up for the harm done by the British government.
The Home Office, the government department in charge of the program, in December admitted the “slow start” but said the program had been improved to make it easier and more active.
The agency has reportedly paid almost 27 million pounds ($37 million) in compensation, up from less than 3 million pounds at the time the overhaul was announced in December. Another 7.1 million pounds was said to have been offered to victims.
“The Windrush injustice would not have happened if Africans were not torn from the continent of Africa,” said Kofi Mawuli Klum, organizer of the Emancipation Day event, which marked the 187th anniversary of the day in 1834 when slaves in the Caribbean and other parts of the British Empire were freed.
Gatekeepers News gathered that after the gathering on Sunday, some activists visited Buckingham Palace, with the expectation to deliver a written request urging Queen Elizabeth II to support their demand for a “Windrush Act″ to pay reparations to those hurt by the scandal.
They were, however, turned back by palace guards, who advised them to send their request through the mail.
