Keep going

Keep going

This week saw alternative street names being stuck to the walls of buildings in some of Glasgow’s grander streets. The person or persons who stuck the new street names in place obviously has knowledge of the history of Glasgow as most were placed in streets named after Tobacco Lords. The new names spotted included Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, Sheku Bayoh and George Floyd.

Rosa was of course the courageous African American woman who in 1955 refused to sit at the back of the bus which was then the designated ‘coloured section.’ Her actions led to her arrest but set in motion the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama which in the end led to change. The courts declared that segregation on buses was unconstitutional and when the city appealed to the United States Supreme Court it too found the practice unconstitutional and ordered that the buses desegregate immediately. The post war civil rights movement had won a victory but the war against prejudice and oppression was far from over.

Harriet Tubman was born a slave in 1822 and was beaten and whipped regularly in her early life. On one occasion an angry slave owner threw a heavy metal weight at another slave but hit Harriet on the head causing her a severe wound and lifelong dizziness. She escaped slavery and made at least 13 missions to help free other slaves from the slave owning states and return then via the ‘underground railroad’ of safe houses to places of safety. She later served as a spy for the union army and was a life-long anti-slavery activist. She died aged 90 in 1913 having spent her life fighting slavery and racism.

Sheku Bayoh and George Floyd were two men who died at the hands of the Police; Sheku died here in Scotland and his death is still under investigation while George died in the USA. George’s death was recorded on a camera phone and posted online. It led to huge anger and demonstrations which continue to wrack the United States. The placing of Street signs bearing the names of these people on streets named after men whose fortunes were built on slavery was no accident.

The 1707 treaty of Union gave Scottish merchants access to the American colonies and this coincided with the deepening of the river Clyde. Being on the western fringe of Europe, Scottish ships had an advantage in that they could get to America more quickly than others and return with their cargoes of tobacco, cotton and sugar. It was tobacco though which led to vast fortunes being made especially after the French monarchy allowed Glasgow a monopoly to import tobacco into France. The ‘Tobacco Lords’ oversaw a boom which lasted 50 years and saw Glasgow expand hugely. Their names still linger on in street names and in the buildings built with the vast profits they made. Names such as Buchanan, Cochrane, Glassford, Oswald, Spiers and Dunlop are still visible in Glasgow as the city honoured them in their day by naming streets after them.

These wealthy men built huge houses and churches for themselves and today we can still see some of them. The current Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow city centre was originally built as a private mansion for tobacco merchant William Cunninghame at a cost of £10,000 (£1.8m at today’s prices) in 1777. Modern Glaswegians may smile at the irreverent placing of traffic cones on the head of the statue of the Duke of Wellington which stands in front of the ‘GOMA’ but perhaps should also consider the beautiful building behind it was built by the profits of the slave economy which drove the tobacco trade.

Another tobacco Lord, John Glassford, had a grand family portrait painted which contained cryptic clues about how his fortune was made. In the portrait the family sit in Georgian splendour while some curious features have been added. A squirrel can be seen on the floor near John Glassford and represents industry and hard work. A parrot is in the window and represents the West Indies where Glassford had plantations. Indeed up to a third of slave plantations in Jamaica were owned by Scots. On the extreme left of the picture is the unmistakable and haunting image of a black slave boy.

St Andrew’s Parish Church, one of the finest 18^th century churches in Britain, sits today in St Andrew’s Square near Glasgow Green. It is an ostentatious and grand church by Presbyterian standards and was built at considerable expense by the tobacco merchants as a fitting place to worship. It was a very public demonstration of their wealth and these ‘Christian’ gentlemen obviously saw no contradiction between their faith and the evil practices of slavery upon which their wealth was built.

The American Revolution brought the tobacco boom to an end and ruined some of the tobacco lords. Others managed to retain their wealth and continued to prosper in the industrial revolution which followed. They left their mark on Glasgow and few questioned the immoral basis of their wealth until modern times. The trans-Atlantic slave trade saw millions of Africans brought across the sea in chains to endure lives of hardship and cruelty. Britain may have been to the fore of trying to end slavery but it cannot and must not obscure the role the country played in this wicked trade. Scotland profited from it too and it is heartening to see people educate themselves about what occurred in those years and how it echoes still in the lives of modern African-Americans today.

African Americans have made progress in the years since the abolition of slavery but they are still likely to be poorer, die younger, go to prison, be less well educated and be victims of crime. One recent report highlighted that the rate of incarceration in the USA was 1730 per hundred thousand for African Americans and 270 per hundred thousand for whites. That is to say African Americans are 6.4 times more likely to be imprisoned than whites. Study after study demonstrates the link between social disadvantage and poverty on crime figures yet little is done to cure the underlying causes of such disadvantage.

Here in Scotland we see that to a far less severe rate among the Catholic population. In 2001 Catholics made up 17% of the population but also made up 28% of the prison population. The 2011 census demonstrated that Catholics were almost twice as likely to live in areas of multiple-deprivation as the rest of the population and that link between deprivation and crime is clear. Catholics are not inherently more criminal than any other sector of society despite what some bigots say. They have also made great use of education as an engine of social mobility and now take a full part in every sector of Scottish life. It is of course hugely inappropriate to compare the disadvantage suffered by African Americans to that of Catholics (mostly of Irish descent) in Scotland as the sheer weight of historical prejudice bearing down on African Americans is vastly heavier, more insidious and longer lasting.

Some have argued for reparations and restorative justice to help the poorer communities of African Americans join the mainstream of society and not be left as a poor underclass. Better schools, homes, jobs opportunities and aspirations would be a start but it seems that a politically polarised USA isn’t listening. The anger being played out on the streets of America is being met with predictable brutality and adding fuel to the fire. History casts a long shadow in the land of the ‘free.’

The street signs in Glasgow will probably come down soon as they contravene local planning laws. It takes more than changing street names though to make real change in a society. Glasgow is a warm and welcoming city and has a social conscience too. Nelson Mandela once praised the city as the first to stand with him in his struggle against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Today a street bears his name too.

It can be hard to judge people who lived long ago using modern values but the tobacco lords for all their wealth must have known and in some cases seen with their own eyes, the suffering upon which their wealth was made. Those fine building which survive to this day were built on foundations of human misery and we should never forget that.

The struggle for equality and dignity is a never ending one. All societies will have wrongs which need righted and the good people who seek human advancement will always keep going.  As Harriet Tubman wrote all those years ago to escaping slaves…

“If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going. If there's shouting after you, keep going. Don't ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.”