Black Lives Matter-supporting website targets 1988-built Portsmouth office block 'stupidly' linked to slavery
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Campaign group Topple the Racists yesterday published Admiral House in Cosham on a map, wrongly claiming a company director – himself born in the 1980s – was a slave owner.
Those behind the website, run by the Stop Trump Coalition, have put together the crowdsourced map after the statue of slaver Edward Colston was topped in Bristol.
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Hide AdThe entry for Admiral House said: ‘Now an office in the heart of Cosham, was built by a slave owner called...’
The News is not publishing the company director’s name.
Under the map the website says: ‘We believe these statues and other memorials to slave-owners and colonialists need to be removed so that Britain can finally face the truth about its past – and how it shapes our present.’
But the High Street building is the headquarters of recruitment firm Compass Associates and was built in 1988.
The entry has since been deleted.
Portsmouth City Council leader Gerald Vernon-Jackson said: ‘If people do things like that, that have no connection, they devalue the whole thing.
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Hide Ad‘It’s just stupid but the trouble is somebody might not realise it’s stupid and might take it seriously. We just have to be really careful.
‘People work in places like that and people do really have to be responsible, and clearly in that case they're not.’
Dave Langford, from the firm, said it must have been a ‘prank’. He said: ‘That’s what we think. Obviously the building was built in 1988, it wasn’t built by slaves.
‘It’s a very intense time. It’s just a prank.’
Anyone can add an entry to the map on toppletheracists.org but they are moderated, the Stop Trump Coalition told The News.
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Hide AdA statement said: ‘The map is crowdsourced and entries are moderated. This one only appeared very briefly in error.
‘In any case, when buildings are listed on the map it only means we are asking for their names to be changed.’