Britain’s shameful slavery history matters – that’s why a jury acquitted the Colston Four | David Olusoga

Jurors were asked to rule that Edward Colston's heinous crimes were immaterial, but they chose to put themselves on the right side of history

There were cheers from the public gallery of Bristol crown court when the verdicts of not guilty were returned. Eighteen months after Bristol's now infamous statue of the slave trader Edward Colston was sent crashing to the pavement, the four young people who had been charged with criminal damage were acquitted.

The strategy that the prosecution appears to have adopted - in a case that some now argue should never have been brought to trial - seemed to centre on asking that the jury be blind to history. Who the statue venerated, they argued, was irrelevant. This, they claimed, was an open-and-shut case of criminal damage, one in which the defendants did not even deny their role in the toppling of the statue or, in one case, helping to roll it to Bristol harbourside, from where it was cast into the water.

David Olusoga is a historian and broadcaster