Citizens Uprooting Racism in Bermuda

CURB's Theory of Change is the map behind everything we do, and we are opening it up over lunch. It traces the line from the problem we are confronting to the programmes we run, the outcomes we measure, and the Bermuda we are working toward. If you have ever wondered how community conversations, restorative practice training in schools, reparations education and policy advocacy all connect, this is the session that shows you the thread.

Come with questions. Lunch is on us.

October 5, 2026
12:30 PM to 1:30 PM
Suite 205, International Centre, 26 Bermudiana Road

Space is limited, so reach out to save your seat.

📱 707-1496
📧 [email protected]

A gap this wide is not produced by individual choices. It is produced by a system doing exactly what it was built to do.

Black Bermudians account for a little over half the population and almost the entire prison population. CURB's Racial Justice Platform sets out how that came about, tracing racial disparity through every stage of the criminal legal process, including stops and searches, arrests, prosecution, plea negotiation, sentencing, and parole decisions.

The alternative already exists. Restorative justice focuses on repairing harm rather than simply punishing it, and in jurisdictions where it is used, victims recover better and reoffending drops.

📢 Language for Liberation: BIGOT

A bigot is someone who is so committed to their own opinions and prejudices that they refuse to consider any other perspective, particularly when it comes to race, ethnicity, religion, or identity. Bigotry is not always loud or obvious. It can live quietly in assumptions, policies, and silence.

Examples:
→ Refusing to engage with evidence that challenges a prejudiced belief
→ Treating members of a group with contempt based on who they are
→ Dismissing someone’s lived experience because it does not match your own

Recognizing bigotry is the first step to refusing it.

Vera Commissiong was one of the members of the Progressive Group, the organisers behind the 1959 Theatre Boycott who kept their identities secret for decades because the risk of reprisal was real.

Speaking on the sixtieth anniversary of the day Bermuda's cinemas reopened with integrated seating, she made the case that the achievement deserves formal national recognition, and noted that what they accomplished has lasted.

It is a fair point. The boycott ended segregation in Bermuda's public spaces in a matter of weeks, without violence, and it did so through ordinary collective action rather than legislation. Hotels, restaurants and other establishments followed the theatres, and the civil service began opening to Black Bermudians.

Several members of the Progressive Group have since been publicly recognised, including Izola Harvey, Florenz Maxwell and Erskine Simmons. Many Bermudians still could not name them.

The people who changed this country are not all in history books. Some of them are still here.

#1959

This is one of the clearest examples of how wealth was transferred out of Black Bermudian hands, and it happened within living memory of people still with us.

In 1920, the House of Assembly passed legislation establishing the Bermuda Development Company and granting it the power to compulsorily acquire more than 500 acres at Tucker's Town, land owned principally by Black Bermudians. A petition against the acquisition was tabled and lost. The bill passed by a vote of 19 to 2.

The land was purchased well below asking price. Residents were displaced, many moving toward Devil's Hole. Dina Smith was the last resident to leave, forcibly removed from her property in 1923. Former owners were later barred from returning to the area, even as visitors, without permission.

The land became the Mid Ocean Club. Its value rose enormously in the years that followed, though none of that increase reached the families who had been removed.

The most common objection to reparations is built on a misunderstanding of what is actually being proposed.

CURB's 2025 Racial Justice Platform runs to more than twenty pages of recommendations, organised into societal, legislative, reparatory, economic, education, and individual reparations. The overwhelming majority are policy and structural changes rather than direct payments.

They include national health coverage that accounts for the workers historically excluded from insurance, mortgage reform through the Bermuda Housing Corporation, restorative justice in the criminal courts, a fully integrated Bermuda and Black Studies curriculum, the preservation of Black sacred sites, and a Racial Equity Index so that progress can actually be measured.

Some of it has already happened. Somers Day was renamed Mary Prince Day in 2020. The pension loophole allowing employers to avoid contributions for guest workers was closed the same year. These came from earlier versions of the same platform.

Reparations are a programme of repair, and much of the work is unglamorous policy detail rather than anything resembling a cheque.

When slavery was abolished across the British Empire, someone was compensated. It was not the people who had been enslaved.

The British government set aside twenty million pounds to compensate slave owners for the loss of what the law considered their property. Adjusted for inflation, that sum is worth billions today. The people who had been held in bo***ge, whose labour built the wealth being compensated, received nothing at all.

In Bermuda, slave owners who complied with the law received their share of that payment. The formerly enslaved began their freedom with no land, no capital, and no compensation, in a society that moved almost immediately into formal racial segregation.

That starting point compounds across generations. It shows up in who owns property today, who inherits, and who can borrow.

This is the historical arithmetic behind the case for reparations, and it is a matter of public record rather than interpretation.

#1834

📢 Language for Liberation: INCLUSION

Inclusion is the practice of ensuring that every person, regardless of their background or identity, belongs and is valued. It goes beyond simply allowing people into a space. It means the space was built with them in mind.

Examples:
→ Designing policies that work for everyone, not just the majority
→ Making sure all voices are heard in a room, not just the loudest ones
→ Recognizing that being “one” does not mean being the “same”

Inclusion is not one single gesture. It is an ongoing commitment…

Mary Prince was born into slavery in Devonshire Parish around 1788 and was sold repeatedly across Bermuda, Grand Turk and Antigua before being brought to London in 1828, where she walked away from the household that claimed to own her.

She could not read or write. She dictated her life story to Susanna Strickland, and it was published in 1831 as The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself. It was the first account of a Black woman's life to be published in Britain, and it sold through three printings in its first year.

The book landed at the height of the abolition campaign and gave British readers something they could not easily dismiss, which was a first person account of what the system actually did to people. Two years later, Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act.

A Bermudian woman who was never taught to write changed the course of an empire's law by telling the truth about her own life.

Since 2020, the second day of the Cup Match holiday has been Mary Prince Day, the first public holiday in Bermuda named for a Black woman.

Workshop aims to address conflict in the workplace A charity has launched a professional development programme to strengthen Bermuda’s workplaces. Citizens Uprooting Racism in Bermuda’s interactive two-day workshop, “Navigating Conflict: Restorative P...