1000 Years A Slave
My5
Streaming now
This four-part series traces the global history of slavery – and how, even now, we live in a world where there are corporations and rich individuals whose fortunes were, back in time, built on the trade in human beings.
Helping to personalise a vast and complex story are well-known faces exploring their family links to slavery. These include actors David Harewood (Homeland),
Ray Fearon (Fleabag) and Hugh Quarshie (Holby City), plus Karen Gibson, founder of the gospel Kingdom Choir, which performed at Prince Harry’s wedding to Meghan Markle in 2018.
The second episode, for example, features US newsreader Shannon LaNier, very likely the descendant of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemings. Jefferson owned slaves yet spoke out against the trade, which he outlawed when he became president. What are we to make of the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings?
Closer to home, the series finds Bristol’s mayor, Marvin Rees, looking back at the 1963 bus boycott that helped end the colour bar operated by the Bristol Omnibus Company, while David Olusoga visits the statue of Edward Colston in the museum where it is displayed after Black Lives Matter protestors toppled it from its plinth and threw it into the city’s harbour last year.