Members of a wealthy British family visited Grenada to apologize for their ancestors owning more than 1,000 enslaved Africans and pledged to give $120,000 in reparations to their descendants. The Guardian reported the event was held in the hopes of bringing some justice that’s been too long denied.

Officials with the University of the West Indies received the money from New York-based BBC correspondent Laura Trevelyan, who researched her family's slave trade ties.

At a ceremony attended by Grenada's prime minister, Dickon Mitchell, in Grenada’s capital of St. George's on Monday (Feb. 27), Trevelyan said the apology was the first step toward reparatory justice.

“To the people of Grenada, we, the undersigned, write to apologize for the actions of our ancestors in holding your ancestors in slavery,” she said on Monday.

Adding that slavery was a crime against humanity and that "we repudiate our ancestors' involvement," John Dower, a fellow Trevelyan family member who stood with Laura in offering the apology. The Trevelyan family will also give privately to scholarships and other forms of school funding.

A total of 104 people descended from owners or tenants of six separate plantations in Grenada signed the apology. On Monday, seven relatives came to the ceremony.

The family appealed to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to negotiate reparations agreements with Caribbean authorities for the exploitation that lasted generations.

“We urge the British government to enter into meaningful negotiations with the governments of the Caribbean in order to make appropriate reparations through Caricom, and bodies such as the Grenada National Reparations Commission,” Dower added. Caricom, or the Caribbean Community, is a group of 15 Caribbean countries.

In 2013, research on the Trevelyan legacy was released by University College London. Slave owners received what would be almost $3 million in today's money in 1834 as part of the abolition of slavery. Laura Trevelyan, who is a U.S. citizen, promised the donation will come from her future BBC pension.

Prof. Hilary Beckles, vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies and a leading reparations activist, stated the Trevelyan forefathers were "leading architects" and a "essential part of the slavocracy of this world".

Slavery, as described by Beckles, is "systematic genocide," and although 3.5 million Africans were carried to the Caribbean by British traders, only 600,000 were still living there at the time of emancipation. Compensating slave owners, he said, was no different from rewarding a criminal for a robbery.

He said, “The enslavers dominated the British parliament. They were the legislators. So the enslavers raided the British Treasury of £20 million (US $24 million) to pay themselves. It was the largest ever expenditure taken by the British parliament.”

The professor said that reparations should not be seen as charity, but rather as reimbursement for the theft of natural resources used in the development of major British cities like Liverpool.

He claimed that the fact that UWI is in the top 1.5 percent of universities worldwide showed just how far postcolonial territories may have developed if the majority of its citizens had been literate 60 years ago.

Beckles urged others who are presumed to owe reparations to see their position as a collaborative one in rectifying centuries of wrongs. He pointed out the brutality and cruelty inflicted on enslaved people meant that they could only work for seven to ten years on average.

Reparation activists are seeking monetary compensation, with reports finding that Jamaica alone is owed the equivalent of $9 trillion.