Jen Reid shakes her head gently at the life-changing decisions that led her to join a Black Lives Matter protest and then clamber on to the empty plinth where the slave trader Edward Colston had once commanded the centre of Bristol.
“I wasn’t even going to go to the protest because I look after my elderly parents,” she says from her front room in south of the city. “But I woke up and was compelled to go because of the way George Floyd was killed. The policeman had his knee on his neck for an age while he screamed for help and for his mother… it was my first-ever protest.”
Reid, who has just turned 50, was about to go home when she heard Colston had been pulled down. She rushed back to see the demise of a statue that had gazed down on her on the way to work for years. Her husband then helped the young crowd drag the graffiti-sprayed bronze to the city’s harbour where it was dumped, like the bodies of dead slaves tossed from Colston’s Royal African Company ships, into the murky waters below.
“It was an adrenaline-pumping moment. The crowd was going mad but it was peaceful. There were people from all walks of life, all different colours, all shapes and sizes involved,” she recalls. “It was poetic justice.”
Despite being afraid of heights, Reid scaled the empty plinth. She remembers the crowd urging her to get to her feet before something quite extraordinary took hold of her. “It took an age. My legs were heavy. I felt like I was sinking into the plinth. But the crowd were like ‘go on, go on’. I managed to stand up and give the black power salute,” she says. “I felt a surge of power. It was giving back power to the enslaved people. Colston is gone. Now there is a new girl in town.”
The striking photo her husband took went viral and in the days that followed she was contacted by the artist Marc Quinn. She agreed to be scanned in Quinn’s London studio. “Marc was very open that he was going to use his white privilege to keep the conversation going and that’s exactly what he has done,” she says.
The following month, a black resin replica of Reid was secretly moved to Bristol. In the early morning gloom, it was lowered on to the empty plinth. “As it was being hoisted up, I could feel its power again,” says Reid, who stayed in a hotel in the centre to witness its arrival and reception. “It was cleansing the city of Colston.”
Afterwards, she briefly became the centre of a media storm, with her name appearing in news reports across the world. Reid did an exhausting round of interviews but found it easy to keep her perspective. “I took it all in my stride because it is not actually about me,” she says. “It is about what the statue stands for.”
People came from across the city to pose for pictures, including a group of 12 young black women, who raised their fists, mirroring Reid’s statue above. “I cried my eyes out,” she adds.
‘I want kids to know that we are all activists and empower them not to sit quietly when something is wrong’
Bristol city council removed it the next day. Marvin Rees, the city’s mayor, insisted that the people of Bristol should decide what replaced Colston, not “a London-based artist”. Reid is cutting about Rees’s response: “The guy couldn’t make the decision about a slave master that’s been up there for god knows how long and he took down a statue of a black woman in less than 24 hours.”
The rightwing backlash against BLM, including a demonstration by bikers and football fans in Bristol, didn’t reach her directly. Reid took herself off social media and didn’t read at the comments on the local paper or listen to radio talkshow callers. “I don’t care about opinions of people who are ignorant, racist and stupid,” she says.
There is still a long way to go for a city so intertwined with the horrors of the slave trade and where ethnic minorities face higher than average levels of unemployment and educational disadvantage, according to the Runnymede Trust. “People say it all happened a long time ago but we only stopped paying compensation to the families who owned slaves in 2015,” she says. “Bristol was built on the backs of slaves.”
If there is hope, it lies with the young. Reid, who endured racist abuse every day at school, is visiting secondary schools in Bristol to talk about the statue, which has now been returned to Quinn. She is also writing a children’s book with the working title The Accidental Activist. “I want kids to know that we are all activists and empower them not to sit quietly when something is wrong,” she says.
The decisions that took to her Colston’s empty plinth have made her realise what she was all along. “Although it was my first protest, I’ve been an activist all my life.”
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